Amusingly, I had just built myself a pretty expensive gaming PC right before selling it all, and then got myself a second-hand 2015 MBP. I'd say the newest M1 MBP are worth the money, my metric shifted from raw performance/$ to experience/$.

And honestly, I will gladly sacrifice some CPU power just to keep myself away from gaming.

I don't understand this. People who are addicted to games won't play any non-intensive games, like League of Legends (or Which is the lower spec one) or speed chess ?

For me, a big draw of gaming is being part of the zeitgeist. New game comes out, I want to try it, talk about it online, etc. Sometimes my friends get into a game extensively (like COD Warzone) and I don't want to be left behind. If I just had a laptop, it wouldn't be possible to run those games on it. And because I don't have any friends playing League of Legends or participate in online communities talking about, it's not really appealing to me.

How did you go about replacing gaming? I often game mostly out of habit but haven't found anything I'm really jazzed about to replace it

It was though, at first I simply switched to surrogate dopamine dispensers which I ended up blocking, only allowing myself access to certain hours for a limited amount of time. Overall: blocking myself from such activities turned out to work well, can't recommend it to everyone though.

I picked up new things by making an habit out of it, such as reading at least a few pages of a book every day. It's cliché, but setting medium to long-term goals also clarified what I wanted my days to be made of, so now I'm very focused on a personal startup project.

Bonus advice that may not apply to you at all: don't be surprised if relatives tries to keep you from changing your habits, or if you find yourself distancing away from friends, it's a feature of improvement not a bug.

I don't have an addiction to games, but I play a lot of them because it's how I keep in touch with my friends from across the country. At the start of COVID/WFH, I was pretty concerned that I'd become a gaming addict. The reason I didn't is one of those smart/dumb oxymorons: I've just been plugging the peripherals from my gaming tower into my work laptop. After a day of work, the absolute last thing I want to do is sit at the same desk staring at the same screen and play games. Even on the weekends, I look at the desk and get this "ugh this feels like work" feeling which has really helped with not playing games in my spare time.

This of course has two huge caveats:

1. I didn't have a gaming addiction in the first place, evidenced by the fact that I have a Nintendo Switch that gets played in short bursts, rather than constantly.

2. I work with embedded systems/hardware, so I need to have an actual workstation area to keep the tools (debugger probes, power supply, oscilloscope, etc) on. The embedded systems curse of always needing more ports has been a pretty effective anchor for keeping my workspace in the same place as my PC, and if it wasn't, then I'd probably get more "I should spend all day today playing games" desires

I ended up feeling the same thing as you. I only have the room for one desk, and so the screens/ other stuff had to be shared. After 8 plus hours in my bed room working the last thing I want to do is spend the time before I sleep there too, looking at the same screen. In the before times the urge was much more stronger.

A cheaper alternative to buying a laptop is install Linux on your existing machine, to add friction to the process. Or, buy a Mac mini.

...then you get addicted to configuring your Linux machine for gaming. Double-edged sword!

Someone commented but deleted on how they felt laptop CPUs have gotten worse in recent years, using the example of their U series cpu being slower than a much older M series cpu. Since I wrote the comment, posting it here:

The U series are "low power CPUs". They can do a lot more than they could in the past, but the H series are the actual successors to the M series. It's why the 10980HK is still the top performing of Intel's CPUs in a lot of workloads (quite significantly in some cases, we're talking 60% reductions in compile times for large C++ projects, like Chrome): https://youtu.be/pdO4u87UCYI?t=346 , and for that workload even an older 9300H handily wins against their current efficiency flagship in the 1185G7.

You are trading off a lot of power for improvements in power efficiency.

It was me! Thanks for the tip about M -> H. Sorry I deleted the comment - I wasn't 100% sure about the models (I don't have the laptops near me at the moment and I didn't want to spread misinformation).