2020 was when the ARM-based chips came out. Did you get her an Intel-based or M1-based mac? Because from 2017-2020 the Intel-based Macs were absolutely awful. I've owned several of them. The keyboards were terrible and they were slow.

I still have 2019 Macbook Airs sitting around, and I consider them completely unusable.

My wife has owned a 2020 M1 Macbook Air since then, and it's still working really well. To the extent that every time we talk about upgrading, we end up agreeing to wait.