Why is buying a laptop so confusing and annoying

This past year I've been checking local listings for used cheap laptops because it'd be neat to have a small portable Linux machine.

It's just surprisingly difficult to confirm what specs a given model has or to find reviews for it. The sellers don't always do the best job listing the components and googling the model numbers may not give you too many results either. Some manufacturers keep reusing the same model name year after year so you have similarly named computers with wildly different guts, or often a specific model number will only give you very local and very limited results which makes me think some SKUs are only sold in a few countries for a short period of time

Buying phones is much more simple in this regard