Whether a Chromebook can be used as a general purpose computer or not is determined model by model:

https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices

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You'd also have to look at a tear down video for the model in question to see the SSD can be replaced at all. Some newer models have them as part of the motherboard. That is recommended for most setups and required after a few years of heavy use, since the SSDs do wear out rather quickly.

??

Most of the modern TLC drives, given standard usage (1-2 GB of writes a day) have sufficient write endurance that it would take 25+ YEARS for them to fail. I wouldn't call that wearing out quickly. Some have endurances that with 1-2 GB of writes a day would last 40+ years until failure is expected.

I use low end Dells (Inspiron 11) for work. They almost always work fine with Linux Mint Cin, which is best for low end machines. People get frustrated running win 10 on them, and pretty much ditch them.

Yes, it does not have a hard disk, it uses emmc, videos/conferencing might not work well.

The hardware is pretty much supported, works fine for browsing work level things. For the cost of fixing a laptop, I can build another (about $100 US). Like I have 2 now.

The weak link is the MMC card, which has a low life expectancy and needs backing up onto a disk.

I have a Thinkpad T450 with a 1600x900 screen (14"), i5-5300U CPU, 8GB memory. In hindsight I would have liked a 1920x1080 resolution better since the display adjustments in KDE are now better. The 1920x1020 fonts are too small without adjustment, but that is a personal preference. It works fine with Slackware and also with Ubuntu, based on experience. Bought from ebay reseller over a year ago. I am running Slackware.

The intel graphics work well, but there is an occasional very fine horizontal distortion line on the screen that disappears with movement. You can get Thinkpads with a nvidia graphics chip, but then you get into the "optimus" graphics system, which ties the intel graphics and nvidia graphics together. I think that works with linux, but I don't have much experience with that.

FYI, for Thinkpads, the trackpoint is a bit of an issue, so my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file has this:
I am not sure what the "rate" does. The KDE and xfce trackpoint adjustment screens don't work very well, IMHO.