I am frequently asked for hardware purchasing advice by family and friends. Starting around 2017 or 2018, if asked to recommend a "gaming" laptop, I have refused. I never had a good experience myself, and more often than not, what I had recommended over the previous years ended up flawed or outright broken. Across every OEM and brand. I tell them to settle for a professional/business SKU with a low-tier dedicated GPU, or give up on laptop gaming entirely. Is it worth the money to pay a "business" premium for a weaker system? No, and I'll tell them that. It's not a good deal in on-paper-dollar-for-performance terms. But at least there's a chance that all of the components function and are supported!
What use is a "good price", when what you get is a quality and support minefield?
With the Steam Deck nowadays there is not much need for a gaming laptop unless you want to play the few games it can't run. Though even integrated GPU's in the more recent laptops nowadays are good enough for running games (usually at low/medium settings, 1080p)
Not a few. You are overestimating steam deck. I have one. It's for small games. And I'm not talking just about AAA or not. Steam deck is pretty weak.
Laptops with the newer nvidia generations that support framegen make this a harder argument. Yes, laptops are always severely power and thermal constrained, but you can run raytraced games at 1440p 240hz on them now. HL2 RTX at that fidelity is a trip. The concept of a high end gaming laptop is a pretty big market, but not when the mfgs and firmware devs can't manage to prevent stuttering that most of their target market would notice and find unacceptable.