The work laptop is a maxed 15" macbook a year or two old, and it can barley handle video conferences, let alone bazel compilations or debugging in vscode. Keyboard and touchbar are a mess as expected. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
I'm going go straight to a Linux/windows desktop, since I'm working from home anyways. More ram, cpu and a real modern video card is basically what I want, and I won't get that with a mac.
I was in a similar boat. Top spec macPro, all the bells and whistles...and the machine ground to a halt trying to compile anything. Rust was particularly bad, but the worst was trying to compile modules for ONOS, which needed some custom Bazel massaging to begin with. First time in my life the "compiling!" xkcd strip[0] was relevant to my life.
Here's a forum thread for more info: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2014-mac...
I don't really want to update it, but am going to have to, as it no longer receives security updates from Apple, as you say won't run latest XCode, which also homebrew complains about and says it can't support my OS, and increasingly software I want to install won't cause the OS is too old.
But there are zero features of an OS update i want. I am terrified of what's going to happen when I update.
However, i still far prefer MacOS UX to Windows, myself. I just a quite fine with it on 10.12.
And my 2015 Macbook is still running fine, by the way, have no need of an upgrade for more CPU or RAM or anything like that.