If you need it, you spend the time and money on Laptops, of course. If you don't strictly need it, giving out Chromebooks and letting employees RDP into their desktops can be cheaper, more secure, and retain all the benefits of desktops (low cost, better security, better ergonomics, better performance, etc.)
Respectfully, that is a load of old bollocks. Don't give people laptops, but give them chromebooks? What? Anyone not equipping office staff with laptop and docks is insane. Laptops + docks give all the niceties of a desktop - big screen, nice keyboard and mouse, expansion - but you can pick up your computer and take it to a meeting. You can work from home with it. You can swap desks on a whim to work with the right colleague. Office moves become simpler and easier to manage. You can (recent news) switch to fully working from home without too much bother. Disk encryption? Automated. Since your staff don't need t o be in the office all the time, they won't be and suddenly you don't need 15% of your in-office seats. Do you know how much office space costs in London, New York or SF? Its a lot more than a few laptops.
The downsides of a laptop are cost (but laptops at the end of a cycle still have value, compare that with your landfill desktop), performance (but not so much anymore), upgrade ability (in 15 years, I can count on one hand the number of desktops that have been upgraded - if someone needs more, they get a new machine).
I think you would have to work in a very specialized niche to require a desktop these days. Sales people don't need it, data entry don't need it, accounts don't need it, IT don't need it, marketing don't need it.
My work laptop is currently plugged in to my home dock, I'm typing on a mechanical keyboard, I've got two 4k screens attached to it, i9 processor, 64 GB RAM, 1TB nvme. I don't do any ML work, but its got a CUDA capable GPU, and I could plug in a GPU enclosure for more CUDA cores if I needed it. Dell will spec this laptop with Xeon processors and up to 128GB ECC RAM. You've got to be a special kind of snowflake these days to say that a laptop won't cut it for your workload.
Likes desktops for the ergonomics but thinks the best way to WFH is to RDP in to your desktop machine... so when the office is shut due to power problems, nae problem, everyone gets a day off?