Genuine question, but would the places that are that inflexible wrt to hardware upgrades have the flexibility to allow you to use a cloud service to perform your most sensitive work?
I worked there and they had these awful surface pros with hardly any memory. Their solution was to use AWS's hosted Desktop for Developers. It.. sort of worked OK.
This, by the way, was not just for a few people: because of Brexit there are thousands of people all working on making the new systems for customs etc work.
I suspect organisations that are undergoing digital transformation (as they are) will have this kind of setup. It was rife through the whole place: rubbish old IT stuff rubbing shoulders with modern SaaS.
I hate this setup. You generally need to have anything audio/video related on the laptop anyway and these are the most CPU hungry apps. Working through remote sessions suck and are high latency even on good connections, it's really noticeable for certain things like alt-tabbing and intellisense and it works awfully for multi monitor setups.
I suspect it's more so companies can pretend all their old rules about keeping data on site can remain. Still, it's better than going back to the office.
