It's highly relevant. Devs aren't obligated to optimize for your friend's extremely weak computer. They may well be optimizing for a median gaming PC instead.
It's completely irrelevant when the conversation is "is this game poorly optimized?" - nobody ever talked about "obligation", that's a strawman you pulled out of nowhere.
The actual topic of conversation is "what games are poorly optimized". "Poorly optimized" means "making bad use of available resources" - which is irrespective of the amount of resources available.
You can make the argument that the devs are making the business decision of intentionally leaving their games poorly-optimized because they don't think that that'll recoup the cost of optimization (which is likely what's happening) - but that still makes those games poorly optimized, by definition.
Optimization isn't a one size fits all thing. Poorly optimized for very low end hardware, sure, I have no trouble believing that. That's not the same thing as being poorly optimized in general.
And realistically, even much older games were not known for running well without dedicated GPU's on old computers.
That's why I loved The Witness devs who released an update for the game, with improved support for my crappy old integrated GPU on laptop. Even though it was not meeting tmhardware requurements of tge game.
> They may well be optimizing for a median gaming PC instead.
This is how you get games that could run good if the user got more control over the model LODs, post processing effects and even render scale, but the developers/project management didn't care.
What's worse, a lot of modern games have great ability to scale back and run on lower end hardware when necessary, but the companies behind them only care about that ability when it comes to getting them running on Switch or a similar constrained hardware environment, that would still let them rake in more cash.
And outside of particular hacks (messing with config files, or using untrusted utilities), the users are often left powerless because a few configuration variables weren't exposed to them for whatever reason.
That's actually worse than Electron apps that are typically badly optimized by default (platform overhead): it's very much like a developer in an enterprise setting choosing to go for the N+1 by looping over data in the app and doing DB calls for each iteration, yet everyone actually is okay with it.
Except for the people who actually don't want their software/game to run slow, just because they cannot afford to throw unreasonable amounts of hardware resources at the problem the devs (and whoever is telling them what to do) inflicted upon them.
Best counterexample to this is probably e-sports titles that are optimized for stable frame times because it actually matters to the developers, or games like Skyrim that expose some of the engine internals to the users, so modders can choose what matters to them.
That said, many developers don't really consider it worth the effort to put lots of thought into options menu and sometimes don't even gate performance intensive post processing like SSAO behind options that can be toggled on/off.
In other cases, they might not have the necessary skillset to use a profiler properly and recognize what is particularly badly optimized, especially for smaller indie projects.
The CPU is an ultrabook-class i3 too, of course games play terribly. This is a surprise to exactly zero people.