Children don't have Slack and Outlook open. Gmail in a web browser and Discord, maybe. My old M1 Air works just fine for productivity workloads, and has for years.
Not sure about slack vs discord, but browser Gmail is almost certainly less memory hungry than Outlook. And that’s probably enough of a difference by itself.
VS Code (or rather VSCodium in my case) is also electron based but it's been relatively snappy in my experience - though I don't use a lot of third party plugins.
