Kind of with you on this. I just installed Arch on my wife’s old 2013 MacBook Pro. Works like a charm.
My work laptop (Fedora Linux, Dell XPS)is over 5 years old. I haven’t bothered to replace it, but will next year just because. The old one will become a retro gaming device for the kids.
I broke some of my devices, and some have battery become useless, and the price of changing is just not worth it, but overall? They last really long time. I even have some shitty 7 years old Chromebook still working okay passed to a family member, and Macbooks in general last very long.
And upgrading laptop components after 5 years just doesn't sound like a good value proposition.
Not sure how your family is using it. But I find that a laptop using as a desktop has a much longer lifespan than a laptop using as intended ( a traveling work station ). Things like moisture, accidental drops, keyboard issue is much more common.
And the upgradable internals sound like more of a hassle than a benefit - especially since buying a different device will be cheaper and probably a better experience since they don't have to engineer for replaceability.
Theoretically you'd get the option to plug in stuff not available in other laptops like strix halo - but then they still don't offer that in laptops. So meh.