In some cases, the bottlenecks are external.

I've seen a test environment which has most assets local but a few shared services and databases accessed over a VPN which is evidently a VIC-20 connected over dialup.

The dev environment can take 20 seconds to render a page that takes under 1 second on prod. Going to a newer machine with twice the RAM bought no meaningful improvement.

They need a rearchitecture of their dev system far more than faster laptops.