I don't think either of us is the target audience here. I can see a "cheaper" (questionable) Pro laptop being useful for students going into college with a limited budget. An undergrad CS/graphic design degree shouldn't tax an 8gb machine too much, assuming students shut down everything else when doing their once-a-semester major rendering/compiling/model training. If people just want Macbook pro software with more ports, a "cheaper" machine is better than none. Personally, I would still get a used/refurbished machine though.
That being said, my current laptop workload tends to be emacs, qpdfview, Firefox, and tmux on EL9. For the remaining stuff, I usually just spin up a VM then ssh/xrdp into it. As for slack, teams, jabber, etc, I'm happy to report I've been out of industry/IT for 1+ years and don't plan on going back anytime soon. For all I care, Apple can call their models unicorn edition. As long as it sells it's not stupid.
Is there a specific reason you're looking at shadowsocks? The original developer has been MIA for years. People who used it in the past largely consider it insecure for its original stated purpose
trojan-gfw is a better modern replacement. However that requires a certificate in order to work. You can easily get one via lets encrypt.
At this point, let Shadowsocks, obfs, and kcp die a graceful death like GoAgent before it did.