Is battery removal still a thing? These new gen high density Li-Ion batteries rarely ever require replacement. Chromebooks run extremely cool, this prolongs battery life significantly - some say up to 5,000+ charge cycles. The old days on hotter intel laptops that cycle might be as low as 500.
Side note, I had to buy my daughter a Windows based laptop this week(ugh). She's doing a lot of art right now and needed drawing tablets to work, and of course Chromebook's can't install drivers. So she's a special case in that regard. I picked her up an Elitebook from a local refurbishing firm I know the owner of. i5-5575, 8GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, Win10 paid $250 out the door and was new in box looking so I stole it at that price but I have access to piles and piles of insane laptop deals around here. I did a Win10 reset on it, locked it down, installed some security apps and she's good to go.
So that's the only case where Chromebook wasn't an option in the home for a mobile device. My daughter is actually annoyed by this development as she much prefers Chromebook because that's all she's really used at School and Home.
PS: Her laptop was behind 12 bios and microcode versions - that was two hours blown stepping through the update path, but since that included Spectre/Meltdown, no avoidance.