You are probably the best candidate for something like LazyVim

Same…

The battery is definitely replaceable but in latest models used to be glued on… I haven’t checked on the Apple silicon models… worse case the Apple Store can do it for you for 70/80€$ You can also remove the glue yourself, there must be an iFixit tutorial on YouTube for it

i am not expecting any SSD to be worn out unless the previous owner was into heavy workloads, which isn’t the case for a lot of mac users. You can technically write over the whole SSD hundreds of thousands of time before losing some capacity. Assuming the OS runs on BTRS you’ll be fine as the file system will auto flag bad sectors.

even if they cannot be upgraded they are incredibly well built (excluding those with butterfly keyboards, steer away from those) and will likely outlive any PC you might have from the same year

did not test with classic Mint but LMDE has been rock solid with WiFi

if you wanted to run macOS on this then yes, it would definitely be ewaste

XFce makes them snappy like when they where purchased back in the days?

At this point you could have moved them to Mint LMDE, which has GUI tools to to pretty much anything, and it is essentially Debian with Cinnamon and some extra tools built by the Mint team