At this one company, the developers have pretty decent HP desktop machines on Windows with Intel eighth generation processors, 8 GB RAM, ... and a $19 500GB har

At this one company, the developers have pretty decent HP desktop machines on Windows with Intel eighth generation processors, 8 GB RAM, ... and a $19 500GB hard disk drive. Why? I am sure someone somewhere got a pat in the back for saving the company money while every single npm operation takes at least an order of magnitude of time more.