My 13” 2015 rmbp is my favorite notebook of all time. My dad uses it now.

I didn’t find it to run that hot and generally found it to be the best windows laptop (via vm) money could buy at the time.

Only the 15 inch 2015 model still had the Haswell CPU, therefore your laptop had a slightly newer processor... That [older] generation was left in the bigger model without the yearly upgrade due to the limited supply / production capacity on Intel's side.

Ah, I lucked out then!

I wholeheartedly agree. I finally moved to an M2 MBP in 2023. I regard the 2023 the same way I do the 2015. It was a worthy upgrade.

My only complaint is that Apple’s keyboards have become significantly less resistant to finger oils and staying on top of cleaning them is much more demanding than it used to be.

I had a 2015 15'' MBP and it ran so hot I simply couldn't use it on my lap. Fans became super noisy even with trivial processes. Ended up selling it.

The rest of the computer was great though (display, keyboard, trackpad, ssd).

When they came out with the 16" in 2019 it solved most of the issues (no more touch bar, good keyboard, etc)

...and I excitedly bought one. And then a year later the M1 came out, and I was kicking myself

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure the 16" models from 2019 also had a touch bar, although as you said the keyboard was much better.

Ah you're right, it had a physical escape button and TouchID button, but a touch bar in between them