[toast0]

I think it's reasonable to have a separate machine to do building on. You can include a push to the target in the build script, or use network mounts or something. Remote debugging is a thing, if you need to use a debugger but don't have the resources to debug on the target. But I disagree with your basic assumption that

> It means their app will feel slow no matter what.

If you can make it feel fast or at least responsive on your underpowered machine, it should feel super fast on everything else. Even today's slowest machines can run some things fast. It does depend a bit on your market though; it might not be worth the effort, but there's a lot of applications out there that could use some speed.

[Gigachad]

Once you’ve got Node, docker, Postgres, redis, an IDE, etc running, the system is out of memory and already chugging before your actual app even opens.

[toast0]

Run all that stuff on a different machine than you run the app on. Unless the app includes all that stuff.

[Gigachad]

It's massively easier to just give someone a macbook that actually works properly and runs everything you need than to hand out people plastic chromebooks and mess around with remote development environments. Then if required, hire some testers to click around on cheap hardware. But realistically, the users on 2010 laptops aren't the ones paying the companies bills so no one really wants to spend money on them.

[kayodelycaon]

Docker is slow enough without giving me crippled hardware.