Looking for Work/light-Gaming Budget Friendly Laptop

Seems like you've got a good group of candidates. I'll just throw in something that may be a different option to consider, if it's even available.

Last year I was looking for similar spec. I looked at MSI, Dell, ASUS, Gigabyte options. But then I ran across an interesting option from a brand I'd never heard of - Eluktronics. Read some reviews and they turned out to be legit and a solid gamer oriented type builder. Newegg had a sale on them and there was an option to order with no RAM, Storage and OS for a significant discount (around $300 IIRC). I have built my own desktop PCs for decades so this was a no brainer to me. I got a Win 10 license for $30, a 512 GB NVMe SSD and 32 GB RAM for around $150, which was a config you couldn't order. So for less than a lower level config I was set.

A couple of weeks after setting it up I ordered a Lenovo Thunderbolt dock to connect it to multiple monitors etc. Couldn't get the dock to be recognized. Contacted Lenovo support and they swapped it out without doing any real checks, and the replacement had the same issue. They gave me a lazy response that it only supports ThinkPads, which was ridiculous. So I contacted Eluktronics support. Brian from their support had me up & running in 15 minutes.