Just because they work in vi as their text editor does not mean they do not run other software on the same laptop. There are fields of software development where performance of your development environment matters.

The $3000 laptop runs the VMs that execute the software that's being built and configured using vi.

Emacs believer here, but the same applies: it's not the editor, it's the supporting software. Like local instances of the project you're working on. Compilers. Web browsers. More web browsers in various team working crap you might need to be using (though I stick to using web versions of stuff like Slack; downloading them as apps is just pure waste of memory and compute). Videoconferencing for remote work. Etc.