This reminds me of Web hosting and the review industry around it 20 years back and I worked for a large web hosting provider.
The founder was really open about it. And back then hosting had ~$100 CPA and we had instances where we wouldn't turn a profit on a customer who purchased a shared hosting account UNLESS they renewed after 2 years given the cost to acquire.
To this day, when I see lists reviewing services providers, I'm always skeptical of them and steer away from letting them influence my decision on a service provider.
I think the arguments is non-developers don't really need access to it.
You aren't configuring anything or doing anything that needs access to the file system.
You are simply interacting with documents and online systems/applications that you can do the same as on a laptop. Add the greater mobility and the iPad pro really is a better device for most people.
However, as another commenter mentioned, these individuals who SHOULD really benefit from using an iPad primarily also are the group that struggle greatly with the changes to their overall workflow (see Who Moved My Cheese).
People who say this have never worked in an enterprise, global software company. Or if they did, they may not be working on key projects.
Just SCALE ALONE is enough to expand a group of engineers a significant amount. A personal project is fine to run 1 AWS or Digital Ocean instance to run the application, database. But global distribution that has to support tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even million+ users concurrently globally? It's a big orchestration of applications and services that requires much larger teams.
Add in payment services and managing those integrations. Then, given that you're a global company and have to operate in multiple countries you have all sorts of regulatory compliance requirements. Who oversees that? Who manages all of these requirements? Not a single dev or a small team.
That's just not how VCs work. Basically it's you HAVE to always show hockey stick growth.
Steady 5-10% per year isn't good enough. It has to grow exponentially. So that's why you keep hiring and keep spreading out the service into a whole bunch of other areas.
1 tripod camera and him wearing one that gets a top down view of what he is doing.