Where's the data that chromebooks have shorter useful lives than other laptops in the same price class? Other laptops on average? It's possible that's the case, but not obvious to me.
How much of a lifetime could a device with soldered on 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage have? How much repurposed could it be? Pricier Chromebooks with HiDPI screens and Core-M or better processors are still castrated in one way or the other comparing to general computing devices, yet approaching their price levels. What's the point for a developer? "It just works"? "It's just safe!" due to mandatory secure boot and BIOS reflashes? "Hey, look ma, a cheap computer, let's buy it as a gift!" for regular Joes?
How many laptops are ever upgraded? You're stuck with the original processor and whatever wear and tear the thing has accumulated. I know I have a small stack of obsolete or half-dead laptops from across the years, and the only upgrade that was ever worth the hassle was hard disk -> SSD.
The "just works" aspect is extremely useful for non-expert users.
I know I have put extra RAM in laptops and once brought a new battery. You are correct in that you are limited to the chipset that came with them, but HDD->SSD is not a trivial upgrade.
I keep thinking about older ThinkPads with Core processors - there is a huge aftermarket with many original parts, many of those notebooks are basically on the level of contemporary i5 notebooks with thicker body and worse screens, but with upgradeable RAM and storage. And you can have them for the price of current Chromebooks.
If a trend in the industry is towards limiting upgradeability, in the direction of rent-seeking by first subscriptions, soldering everything onto mainboard, limiting connections, later perhaps rental fee for equipment like it is with car leasing, a trend which I consider insane, can't I object to it? Chromebooks are basically a prime example of this trend, while regular notebooks didn't embrace it fully yet, but are getting there as well. Can't a company with arguably the best predictive platform in the world model and foresee the effect on environment, or is it just profit and mindshare that matters these days?
I doubt a developer would buy such an underpowered machine in the first place.
That said, I currently use a laptop that's seriously underpowered (by choice when I bought the thing ~7 years ago) with 4GB of RAM running Fedora and it does everything I need -- never once have I found I wasn't able to compile whatever random code I happen to be playing with at the moment. If ever I had to do serious dev work (like, it was my job) I'd need a better laptop but for the tinkering I do it works out just fine...though I did have to give up on Blender hacking a while back because of OpenGL versioning issues and I can't afford to buy a fancy new machine. That might not be an issue anymore, haven't checked on the OpenGL compatibility in quite a while TBH.
I actually used to hack on Blender with a 2GB netbook (also running Fedora) before I got my current "beast" so those things aren't completely worthless as you would suggest.
I use a netbook with Atom CPU as my retro gaming device and it's fine for that. But with Chromebooks you are one accidental key press during the boot away from completely wiping out your custom OS you managed to install with quite a bit of difficulty. Chromebooks are very restricted, intentionally, you can't really compare them to similarly specced notebooks that could be easily repurposed for less demanding tasks.
