Much like the consumer lines from other brands, it’s a lot of cost-cutting. Plastic everything, hinges that break prematurely, limited power filtering, that sort of thing.
One that frequently pops up (although I’m not familiar with that particular model) is poor cooling. Heat kills many gaming laptops, either directly or indirectly. That can mean needing more fans/bigger vents, being unable to clean them, or liquid metal thermal paste that leaks and shorts out.
Don’t just consider the brand. You have to consider the line/model.
Lenovo’s consumer lines (Ideapad, Legion, and others) are all absolute garbage, and you shouldn’t consider them for even a second. But their enterprise line (Thinkpad) is generally very, very good. The main problem is that they’re expensive.
Asus is strictly consumer-grade. They do not have an enterprise line. Their build quality is among the best you can find in consumer-grade, but enterprise-grade is always higher quality than consumer-grade.
I would never leave an OEM load on it, so privacy isn’t much of a concern for me. I suspect they’re both pretty bad in this regard.
I’m assuming you’re in the US and looking at Dell Latitude, HP EliteBook, or Lenovo Thinkpad, possibly on eBay from a recycling company.
Many large corporations buy these with a 3 year warranty, and stretch those to 4 or 5 years unless they break. Once the devices are too old, they go through a decom process. This usually includes sanitizing the data. Depending on the corporation, this could mean a secure erase, or it could mean physical destruction with a grinder. Then they send it to a recycler or refurbisher, who pays them a pittance for the remaining value. It’s also why they are frequently missing the hard drive caddy - the difference in value is minimal, so they remove it the fastest way possible.
Power bricks and docks are usually usable on other models/generations, so those aren’t sent to recycling until they are useless. That’s why you often see laptops listed without bricks.
7th gen is from 2017. Most corporations are on a 4-year cycle, so have already been replaced twice since then. Very few are motivated by the Win11 requirements.
Thinkpads are enterprise machines, so they aren’t really designed for gaming. But there’s a lot of overlap with things like graphics rendering, so they do have some options.
The T series is the standard corporate line (usually T14) for the average office worker. These sometimes have a dGPU available. You’d probably want something in the P line, but those are much more expensive.