
They aren’t wrong IMO - if you don’t do anything that requires a lot of processing power or really need a lot of slots for peripherals, PCI cards and drives, you might as well connect your external display, keyboard and mouse to a laptop. It gives you the option to take the entire thing with you, and a lot of people have spare laptops anyway.
I know plenty of people who don’t even use their laptop much because they’re doing everything on their phones or game consoles.
I’d assume that most governments (other than the US) don’t have easy access even if E2EE in WhatsApp etc. is a sham - these companies are definitely intent on keeping the pretense up, and smaller countries aren’t able to disprove it.