It's also my experience that people who use the Airpods audio in meetings = poor sound, whereas when they switch to the Macbook, it's much better.

I think the Macbook does some more advanced beamforming stuff to filter out sound coming from other directions.

It's more a sensitivity thing, which is related to, but not quite the same as, distance.

HA mics are not designed/oriented to pick up your own voice; if anything, they might be tuned to avoid it. After all, you know what you're saying.

Conversely, I'd expect laptop mics to be highly sensitive to the voice of the user.

In practice, before I got my scripts set up, people would complain I sounded distant, muffled, or tinny, when the HA mics were being used.