Sounds like you’ve had a lot of issues with them then.
I had my HP laptop for 4 years before it broke but it broke because I kept dropping it because it was too heavy for me (anything over 2.5kg is far too heavy for me to use without dropping it when moving it or something)
And the HP I have now I’ve had for a few months so I can’t really say if it’s going to cause issues or not.
Unfortunately I can only afford what I can afford and since I like console gaming too I have spent quite a bit on that (less than on sims and tech for sims though) and TVs to make games look even better so my overall tech budget is very stretched.
Part of me wants to just sell as much as I can and then save for like a year to be able to get the type of laptops you’re recommending but if the i5 HP is going to work for all the sims games and be fine while running them as long as I use a cooling pad and work for as many years as my old one then that’s fine with me.