I wonder how many of your friends were around during the 2006-2011 MacBook Pro eras. There used to be a brief time when the 17-inch MacBook Pro line was
the laptop vanguard, no exceptions. I remember just a couple releases after the first generation, I was wowing data center clients with these laptops before putting on my presentations as a traveling consultant. Mac OS X wasn't nearly as well-known back then as it is today.
The usual opener to me was why I was carting around a Mac (subtext left unsaid was why was I different than other vendors). I replied that it was the only out-of-the-box Unix CLI laptop that "Just Worked". That wasn't what got my clients to sit up and take notice; they only nodded and murmured that it made sense, and I got some tech cred out of that bit. What got them to sit up was when I ticked off the hardware specs, showed my demo environment in VMWare Fusion, and some would out loud exclaim what was going through everyone's head: holy crap, this Mac has more RAM than some of our smaller servers, and could actually run some of the smaller server loads under emulation, while in the native OS X I could have Microsoft Office, X11, and native Bash and a Mac GUI-friendly Emacs.
Then some of them jumped onto the ordering pages for their corporate laptop fleet's vendor and figured out that a comparably-equipped laptop from that vendor fully-tricked out like my MacBook Pro not only was priced like a CAD workstation (when it was even available, for a short period of time MacBook Pros were one of the very few laptops at all that could have its max RAM), but the non-Apple laptop ended up much heavier, bigger and in some cases more expensive...
Instant. Lust.
Every single client technical staff member I had this conversation with would have traded in their current corporate setup with what I had in an instant, switching costs of learning a new OS and applications be damned. Were it not for corporate policies and budgets preventing swapping bottom-of-the-barrel corporate fleet laptops with this techno-lust magnet, there would have been a stampede out of the conference room every time I had this conversation. The ability to model a small-scale version of a small slice of your work infrastructure directly onto your laptop was incredibly appealing to these IT technical staff, for obvious reasons.
This went on for several more generations, but the retirement of the 17-inch model put a stop to that reaction in the field. Going back through some of Jobs' keynotes for those generations of MacBook Pros, one might get a sense of how proud he was of just how singular an achievement it was back then to unobtrusively combine all those specs (hardware and software) in a beautifully-delivered package. He didn't harp upon it, but for anyone who was using it back then, you grokked it in an instant. It was Jobs' current iteration of a bicycle for the mind at that time.
I suspect a lot of the negative reaction your friends are seeing is the grief of stepping down from that pinnacle for the small, vocal group of users who were used to residing in that lofty perch, and actively used those capabilities. Withdrawal symptoms.
Not for me to say whether or not this is "right"; no one outside of Cook's inner circle are privy to Apple's go forward strategy, and only they know how this most recent generation release fits into that.
An off-the-cuff example of how this might in retrospect suddenly seem "right": next year, Apple releases an OS X that seamlessly checkpoint restarts any OS X application from a MacBook/Pro to any server in the cloud, optionally splitting the canvas drawing to the laptop as mostly-vectorized compressed streaming opcodes and all other operations run on the server. As long as you can reach a web page, and hit an Apple server or a proxy that you run, you can connect. The population of people who really need a tricked-out MacBook Pro with 32/64/128 GB RAM gets a lot smaller over the years with that available.
Myself, I buy my high-RAM workstation-class "luggable" elsewhere, and no longer hope for Apple to return to those days I described. I'll stick with an Apple laptop for macOS as my daily driver; the luggable mostly operates in headless mode.