As a long time gamer who assembled his own rig a year before starting my IT program and classes.. this is pretty accurate.
My main rig(i7-7700k,1080TI,970evo+970pro,32gbRAM) sat in my office for 3-4 months gathering dust while practice my Bash/shell scripting on a 2009 alienware laptop that I had to replace the HDD for a 75gb kingston SSD.
"Alienware, that's not shit?!" ... Since I had it when I was a dumb fuck immature teenager, it died about 2-3 years in due to overheating. When I replaced the HDD 3-4 months ago, I shit you not, I found scorch marks on the underside of the metal plate. Part of the heat sink is actually spray painted black on the edges; I swear I thought it had turned black from use at first and was freaking the fuck out. I only calmed down after I noticed the same spray paint in youtube videos.
People aren't kidding when they say you can get into IT/programming with as little as a barely functioning laptop with a wifi/network card. The only time I've ever felt like I actually did benefit from dumping 4-5k in a rig was when practice creating subnets. That 32GB RAM was a fucking godsend when installing and running 2 win7, 2 win10s and a bunch of srv2008 and 2012 as LAN routers. God. Send.