I don’t understand why the author didn’t take medical leave. That’s exactly what this is for. You get reduced pay while on leave, though you can work with the company to see if they can fulfill a portion of that. My current employer covers 30%, while short-term covers 60%. 90% pay to be able to completely disconnect from work for several months is absolutely worth it.
It does sound like communication with the manager was poor, though. The manager should have been more empathetic to their situation (depends heavily on how comfortable the employee was with giving out this information).
If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc.
But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten faster, but the internet is still usable on a 10 year old machine.
I've replaced my battery once already, but consider your keyboard/screen are likely things to break at any point in time with accidents.
And we're comparing this to apple, a company that has been basically DRM'ing components - even if you can buy the replacement you can't use it without it being "programmed" by apple.
EDIT: Also note that the bare minimum models from 10 years ago are likely too slow nowadays, I mean to compare this to the medium-upper range devices of the time, potentially with relatively low cost upgrades like an SSD.