I feel this website is a strange bubble. I use an underpowered laptop from 2013 for all my daily tasks including light photo, video and audio manipulation and I have no problems. Why does it always have to be about videogames, heavy creative work, multiple VMs or compiling gigantic codebases?
One thing to keep in mind is the demand of the specific OS/applications you are running. For example, 1GB of RAM is plenty for Windows XP, but 4GB for Windows 10/11 is abysmal. This is more or less why Linux is such a popular choice for repurposing old computers.
