This phenomenon seems like an almost inevitable symptom of another thing companies do, this one completely understandable: Making sure the dev team has nice equ

This phenomenon seems like an almost inevitable symptom of another thing companies do, this one completely understandable: Making sure the dev team has nice equipment to work with. If we're always working with reasonably high-end kit, it impairs our ability to empathize with the experience of someone who's using a cheap Chromebook or the "free" phone. Contrast with a previous place I worked, where the team that was building in-house tools worked on hand-me-down equipment from their end users. That's a shop where the users almost never had to complain about poor UI performance.