I don't think they "gaslit themselves," but I do think M1 was good enough a lot of people stopped thinking about hardware and their frame of reference is horribly out of date
T14 Gen 5 AMD has replaceable RAM, SSD, battery, and WWAN. Just got one for Linux (besides my MacBook) and loaded it up with 64GB RAM (which was only 160 Euro) and a 2TB SSD.
I had never really used a mac (or anything from apple) before M1, and since I got an M1 air I never looked back. Not all people who are hyped about apple silicon were previously apple users.
It is true though that in terms of laptops my only experience to compare it with was with intel chips, but that's because it used to be hard to find an AMD laptop back then.
In the context of software development, I run Linux on those AMDs and it's a great experience. It's not for everyone and I respect that, but it's not too hard these days.
Also a Windows machine with WSL isn't the worst thing, just treat it well.
The problem is that you pay with battery life. I did some Windows vs Linux laptop battery life testing when I bought my Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4.
The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. This actually produces a fairly decent load including video decoding (because Reddit autoplays by default, and there are plenty videos in the feed). I also had Thunderbird, Discord, and Telegram running in the background.
On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes.
On Linux Mint 21.3, it dies in 200 minutes.
Now, this is because Chrome (and Firefox!) disable GPU-accelerated rendering by default on Linux due to "unstable drivers". To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.
I had a 2023 ASUS Zephyrus G14 (AMD 6800 + 6900HD dGPU) and I took a battery hit, but not near what you saw. Somewhere closer to 20-25%.
It’s bigger problem was it was far too eager to trigger the dGPU, especially with accelerated graphics in browsers and the like. So I ended up running it in integrated only mode, unless I wanted to play games.
The problem with Apple is there is this awful MacOS along with the walled garden company called apple. The Problem with windows is.. none I can install my own.
AMD did catch up quickly, it's too bad they had to solder RAM to match but it is what it is...