Unfortunately newer thinkpads are prone to goddamn cpu throttles, though that is in part due to intel. Nonetheless, at work I had to replace a brand new thinkpad t14 because other than manually tweaking the CPU frequency (which is not allowed by company policy but I did anyway, otherwise I may have thrown the laptop out the window which is even less in line with company policy) it throttled like crazy at random times. I even have this problem on my thinkpad t480, though it is not as bad there. The T14 throttles down to goddamn 4-600 mhz, where it is practically unusable.

But I agree, for family members I always try to find a used <T480 laptop in good conditions, because these are faster than similarly priced low-end laptops (seriously, what they offer at the low-end is just criminal, they want to take advantage of the technically illiterate), and basically everything can be changed inside.