[stcredzero]

Developers generally need to run a bunch of resource intensive tools to build the application in the first place, so an underpowered system will already be choking.

Straw man. Of course, if you crank that knob to the extreme bad things happen.

There might be a case for specifically running testing on a slower machine, though.

Agreed here. I think the optimal is for devs to be able to do intensive operations on a fast machine, dogfood for most of their time on a average machine, then test on a somewhat slow one.