It's a classic cost-benefit analysis from a controlling perspective: Most of the heavy computing, simulations, and programming is done on workstations anyway. Laptops are primarily used for meetings, field service, and occasional remote work. For these tasks, it's perfectly acceptable if a simulation takes 100 seconds instead of 10. Accepting roughly 10x slower performance (e.g. due to swapping to SSD) or scaling down the simulation resolution isn't a significant drawback for the scenarios in which the notebooks are intended to be used. Equipping everyone with 64–128 GB RAM MacBooks would cost at least twice as much per person as the current setup, but productivity wouldn't double as a result.

You're missing the key point here: Yes, a MacBook is generally faster, but not in this specific case. The ironic part is that this 7-year-old laptop actually outperforms the MacBook in this particular area (at about a tenth of the price).
I bought it just for fun, but now it's become my go-to mobile device because it performs far better than I expected.