I was fed up with constant windows maintenance. Reinstalling windows every year was still a thing then (2012). Tried Linux (try it every other year) but this is still nothing for me. To much maintenance to. Bought a macbook pro retina in 2013 which is still running.good on Catalina.
I use windows for work. It‘s OKish but the amounts of tickets I had to open for malfunctions of the software is still baffeling. And a Macbook Air 15‘ with 512Gb isn‘t that expensive compared to a windows machine of the same specs
I bought a new 16" M2 pro, 16/512 Gb a few days ago for the same price as a 15" M2 air 16/512 now. For the reasons you wrote above. It will replace a 13" pro retina from early 2013 and I expect to replace it not before 2030. And the old retina I hand down to my kids for homework. The last time I spent 2000 bucks on a windows laptop were totally gone in 5 years.