If you're travelling.. light is very nice. Or working on laptop without a desk (ergonomically nightmare though). I've a thinkpad P50 that's about to get 6 years old.. At the time I had choice (at my college university) to buy either a dual-core 8GB ultrabook, or this workstation (price difference was only 150 eur or so). Over a span of 6yrs I'm glad I got the workstation variant.. even after 6 years it's still a capable lab machine with i7 and 16GB of RAM, ~100Wh battery, 3 disk storage slots, but it does weigh almost 3kg...
You can probably get the same performance in an ultrabook form factor nowadays.. say a Ryzen 5600U or a Apple M1. It makes a Macbook Air quite an interesting form factor.. Battery life, weight, size? Very good, hard to beat with many Windows laptops. Fanless design? Not really a big issue IMO. If I do prolonged heavy work I'll use my desktop or home server. Get the Pro if you do need more cooling. You need to step up to the larger M1 chips anyway to get any appreciable more performance.
The big elephant in the room though is the base memory config and upgrade cost. They clearly target their machines at regular consumers with standard 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD configuration. That'll be plenty for normal use.. (probably 90%+ of the consumer base). It'll probably be "fine" for even some light dev work, but if you start any Java IDE nowadays it will chew up through 2GB+ of RAM. Open a webbrowser.. file manager.. e-mail.. chat applications.. and it's clear they didn't had massive multi-tasking in mind for the standard config. Of course it's fixable.. if you pay the crazy upgrade fees upfront. I think that deserves far more to be called out
I don't even think that if they made the laptop thicker, that they would put in any kind of slot anyway. Why would they? People will buy nonetheless. And who needs repair-ability and data recovery anyhow.