Chrome and Slack are both resource hogs from hell. No one is arguing that the specific innards haven't changed a lot. They are arguing that for a lot of people, depending on what you are doing and what you need, can get by just fine on a laptop that is few years to 15 years old and be perfectly happy.

You are also trying to compare a laptop an entirely different architecture that literally just came out to the other.

I mean, honestly, there were plenty of "arm laptops" the past 20 years and a lot of them ran cold to the touch and got 16+ hours of battery life. I know as I had several (Psion netbooks etc). The new Macs are latest evolution of H/PCs that have been around for decades. They just happen to be much faster ;)