Is it? When you're inside the fence you get some IT cast off from the last guy that was cleaned up and re-spywared from 2-3y ago (sometimes worse!). As a hired gun (data science/engineer), I have an m3 128gb 1tb all sliders to the right MacBook Pro that works great, no spyware, rocket fast, trains/runs small models. With Apple 0%, paid in a year. I generally can name my price so it pays for itself.
If you're riding it every day, every little speed up counts. I don't wait on GitHub actions or external systems for my crunching. For that I have my local slurm cluster of mini PCs, 64 cpus and counting!
I assure you there is a better world outside of the fence, I am unlikely to return.