Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy machine, and there are professional programmers that just need a dumb terminal to ssh into a dev machine in the cloud.
And then of course what the largest subset of people seem to mean is professional video editors or content creators. What percent of the working population are video editors? Some tiny fraction, how did that become the default type of professional in the context of talking about computers?
And then a lot of things that people also complain about like how replacing the wider variety of ports with usb c or thunderbolt is contradictory on a “professional” machine also don’t really make sense. Professionals can use dongles like anyone else. In fact many professionals will have more specific needs that require a single a way, for instance having a builtin sd card reader doesn’t help a professional photographer using cfexpress cards.