I'm one of them. For work, come and grab my 2019 16in from my cold dead hands - it may not have the battery lifetime of my private 2022 M2 MBA, but at least I don't have to fight weird issues with x86 Docker images (especially anything involving a JDK runtime, i.e. Tomcat, tends to act up). And no, converting these images to ARM isn't an option, the source image doesn't come from us, and we need to reproduce the exact software environment to reproduce bugs.
And for me as a Samsung phone user, I'm pretty annoyed that I have to drag out a win10 machine every time I want to update the firmware of my phone because Odin is only available on Windows and UTM can't use Rosetta to emulate a Windows VM at any acceptable speed or stability.
2019 16"cher here too. These are great machines just eclipsed by all the Apple silicon hype. Yes they suck comparing to performance, power use and heat to Apple silicon, they're still amazing x86 laptops compared to whatever other x86 machines are out there.
I have 1 of these for work and 1 for home. I'm waiting 5 years from release, so about 2024-2025. Computers got really good around 2017, and the only reason to upgrade is the heat and fan. I use remote VMs anyways, so chrome is really my limiter.
And for me as a Samsung phone user, I'm pretty annoyed that I have to drag out a win10 machine every time I want to update the firmware of my phone because Odin is only available on Windows and UTM can't use Rosetta to emulate a Windows VM at any acceptable speed or stability.