Apple builds their devices for consumers not developers. With each iteration people are increasingly locked into that ecosystem. And the hardware is designed to be obsolete within 5 years or so.
Laptops in general are built to a price point. Personally, I only find the gaming laptops sufficiently appealing, but the price tags put me off.
Have you considered a desktop / minitower for the bulk of your work? Multiple LCDs are great for productivity. Then a ChromeBook might suffice for on the road use.
It's funny: there was a time when Apple understood that it could attract customers by making its devices the first choice for developers. And it did a good job, with a real Unix underneath that wasn't overly hidden, with a lot of open source support, and just generally being an ok citizen in the developer world.
That strategy, which I think ran from early OSX through until mid-2010's? worked, and you'd see the results, with a sea of glowing Apple logos, even at Linux conferences.
I think they've changed since then. It feels now like developers are not a priority, even as they've re-added some power-user features in recent years.
As for longevity, I think my current laptop speaks for itself. It's now 11 years old, and going strong. I've carried it around the world, dropped it numerous times, and it's been the best laptop I've every owned. They do artificially force an end-of-life, usually at around 7 years old, for their operating system. I don't really have a problem with that: I appreciate that it's difficult to continue to support old hardware in new releases, and I think that timeframe is reasonable. I'd prefer that it was explicitly stated, and I'd prefer it was longer, but ... it's not bad, really.
Over the years I have had many devices: desktop PCs, Unix workstations, Linux workstations, and laptops from 6" to 17". In the early 2000s I bought a 12" Powerbook, which was my first Mac -- the motivation was to get seamless Microsoft Office document support on a Unix system, and it did a fine job of that. Eventually I spilled water on it, and replaced it with a 13" unibody MacBook, which I later upgraded to the current 15" MacBook Pro.
I currently have a work-supplied dual Xeon 56 core, 192GB RAM, 8TB SSD monster Dell with 2x27" screens on my desk which is used for my day job compiling a large proprietary C++ application. That's the right kind of machine for that job, and I wouldn't do it on a laptop by choice.
But for my personal stuff, while I'd previously set up my laptops as a secondary device to be used when travelling, when I got the 2014 MBP, I deliberately upgraded to the 15" screen, maxed out the CPU, and got a big SSD so I could make it my primary device. And that's been a model I have liked a lot.
I don't travel anywhere near as much these days, and could probably revert to a desktop instead and just access that remotely via Tailscale when I travel, but ... I like having everything in the device in my hand.
But it's a good point: I should probably reconsider.