Whats your use case?
Was somewhat recently considering a linux laptop myself and ended up deciding the steamdeck fit my needs well.
A dock + portable keyboard & mouse for when i need to do typing or w/e, and a fun handheld console for when i want fun.
That being said, depending on what your “older” laptop is, it might not actually be much stronger, or it might be wildly overpowered for what you need.
So they both store data in a table like structure, but that’s about where the similarities end. Excel is useful for handling smaller more flexible data sets, but has performance, scalibility, storage, and structural deficiencies compared to SQL, it’s also harder for computer languages to communicate with a shared excel dataset and modify it vs SQL.
One of the major issues with excel as a database is data limits, excel only allows for ~1 million rows. Considering there are ~1 billion possible SSNs, excel would not be a great medium for them for that reason alone.
One big advantage of SQL is you need to structure your data on the creation of the table and it’s designed with the expectation that all data will fit a structure, including unique keys, format, and other limits and structures. This allows you to enforce database rules easily and massively reduce storage size and query times.
There are a bunch of other reasons for using SQL but most of it boils down to either it’s faster, easier for multiple computers to access and read/modify simultaneously, or better for enforcing rules and structures when modifying it.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/243/
Do you have any preferences (distro, cpu/gpu manufacturer, etc) and a budget? Most of the games on your list I am familiar with and will run on damn near anything remotely modern.
Lacing direction, with the fairly low requirements (from what i recognize), and assuming you are price conscious id suggest you poke around the used gaming PC market (either gamer friends, or failing that online), which will also completely bypass the tariff issue too.
PopOS is pretty solid for linux gaming and has a distribution specifically for Nvidia too which handles most of the headache with Nvidia if you go that route.
EDIT: Poked around the requirement pages of the ones i wasn’t familiar with, i didn’t see a single game that had a requirement of anything newer than 10 year old hardware, depending on your friend network, you could get a computer that could play those games well for a song. Civ 7, your ‘evenutally’ game, is the only thing listed that has strongish requirements, and would be what i would pay attention to if you are aiming higher.