I remember hearing people complain about their keyboards, not that they couldn't video conference.

With COVID lockdowns a huge population of people suddenly started video conferencing with Zoom/Teams/etc. If pre-COVID you only conferenced occasionally with those apps or used FaceTime or some other conferencing better using hardware encode/decode the keyboard was likely your biggest problem.

might be it, definitely wasn't hearing from people as much post-covid.

In just about any HN thread on Apple’s Intel-powered laptops, you’ll find plenty of actual users complaining about excessive fan noise and getting heat-soaked under load - compilation and video calls being a big one - with the problem being greater for the higher-powered i7 and particularly i9 machines. We were definitely complaining.

I can believe in the conspiracy theory that i9 models were released purely to show how bad Intel processors were and to make Apple Silicon look better.

Haha, I probably wouldn’t go that far, but yeah. I had a 15” i9 and they definitely weren’t worth the premium. Doesn’t help that it had what was probably the worst Pro chassis in the past decade or so.