Very little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.)

You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on that machine. There is a huge, absolutely amazing distributed build system that everyone uses for everything. (Again, Android and Chromium are different.)

So you don't really need a powerful local machine. I held out for a long time--there were a lot of growing pains in the early days. But eventually it got really, really good.