Generally AMD had a poor reputation so indeed AMD chips ended up in budget product lines. But the tables have turned retrospectively because no one realised from 2008 to 2013 that AMD unwittingly had a pro-consumer privacy advantage, however accidental.

Unfortunately nobody ever put AMDs APUs into actually good laptops,

The CPU is part of what makes a machine “good”. You could say Thinkpads were good for their repairability, upgradability, and stability of design across models – exactly the factors that Apple is the poorest at. If good means /rugged/, then in fact there are some ASUS, Acer, and non-thinkpad Lenovos that had a stainless steel chassis (with pre-spychip AMDs).

Conneseurs of the time would not care to track the various models of perceived junk. But retrospectively it started making sense to do so – once knowledge of the spy chips was well established. But this is a very niche community who gives a shit about spy chips. Masses of normies just care about specs and performance which is who we would rely on to document the hardware.