And the performance still isn't even close to a mid range desktop machine which would have cost 1/4 the price. I'm seriously considering selling my MBP buying

And the performance still isn't even close to a mid range desktop machine which would have cost 1/4 the price. I'm seriously considering selling my MBP buying this Mac Book Air top config (I need an OSX machine to develop iOS/OSX apps, otherwise I would go for Lenovo X1 Carbon) and building a desktop which will be always on VPN for heavy lifting + it can replace my gaming console. I have a MacBook Pro 2018 and Intel NUC running Linux with exactly the same CPU. In typical C/C++/Rust builds, the Linux NUC is perceptibly much faster than the MacBook. Didn't dive much deeper, but I'd guess the difference is thermals (despite the NUC having a small enclosure) and much higher system call overhead in macOS. That said, I still like having a Mac as well, since there are so many great applications that I use frequently. But a sweet spot (as you suggest) is a reasonably powerful MacBook for the things that macOS is good at and a powerful Linux workstation or server for compute.