I'm a consultant, and have been for 20 years now (except for a 2 year stint as an employee for the benefits and relocation assistance to move my family from Texas to NYC).

At the NYC employment job, I was on a 2 year upgrade cycle being a software developer. Just whatever the current year Dell corpo laptop was. No procurement procedures, just IT got 2 year replacements, our laptops went to the non IT workforce after reimaging.

As a consultant I usually bring my own device, and my laptops are usually WAY more capable since I will run each client on their own VM - makes it easy to delete the client when the contract is up. But I've had one client who did not allow BYOD, and any billed work had to be done on their hardware. That was fine, except that the desktop I was given was already a 12 year old dual core non-hyperthreading CPU that wasn't meant for developers even when it was built. I begged and pleaded for 6+ months for me to either bring in my own hardware they could image now and wipe at the end of the contract, or to please buy me a PC from this decade.

It took 3 years to get the budget approval for a $2000 tower, roughly the equivalent of 15 hours of pay. The thing that finally pushed it over the edge, was that my PC could not handle Teams + Visual Studio at the same time, and manager couldn't handle that he couldn't watch me program.

All of that to say I doubt these non-data-driven organizations are basing these decisions on anything other than micromanagement. Nothing to do with measured or assumed productivity, nothing to do with costs, so all I can think is they have to be a "decision maker" on all aspects.

I never understood why no company I worked at could hire someone just to manage the kitchen instead of paying engineers massive salaries to argue about unloading the dishwasher.