I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.
All you need for that is a dumb terminal.
Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.
Well, that's also what a MacBook Air is. And a MacBook Neo is the same but with a phone's processor, instead of a tablet.
But that first tiny ARM Chromebook I tried in mid 2010s actually sucked a lot. It was cheap, though. It was the time of the netbook craze.