>I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU.

A laptop with a DGPU within that price range is mostly a NVIDIA MX-series GPU.

But you can get a good NVIDIA GPU with the Acer Nitro 5 (from 2020 and upwards) series and maybe an Ideapad gaming.