Password isn't enough to protect your laptop

So this can happen

Normally when you boot a laptop, you'll be greeted with a login menu that asks you to select a user, then type in a password. If someone wants to snoop on you and manages to get their hands on your laptop, without knowing your password, they can't login. But they can use a bootable medium (these days it would be achieved by flashing a linux distro image on a flash drive) to boot this laptop, making the files on the disk readable. But what's worse is they can extract your online account credentials. They can also pry the laptop chassis open, and attach HDD / SSD to another machine to achieve the same thing.

On an Apple Silicon laptop, there is no SSD, rather it's flash chips soldered directly on the logic board, which are paired with a unique encryption key located on the SoC (System on Chip). Specialized repair shops can extract the flash chips from an Apple Silicon laptop, but you still can't read their content without booting them from the machine they were paired with. Essentially it's impossible to use the bootable medium method to access the disk content, but the tradeoff is it'll be very hard to upgrade your mac's storage.

There's a way out

To mitigate this, you can enable disk encryption. On linux it's LUKS, but you can use BitLocker on windows. You'll require two passwords in order to access a laptop: boot and user password. On boot, you'll have to supply a password, this will be the same regardless of which user you'll use to log into the operating system. Once you are greeted with a login menu, select a user and type in a user's password. The previous method to use a bootable medium to access the disk content would fail here, because they would see gibberish instead.

But typing in a boot password every time can be very tedious, which is why you can store the boot password in a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip. On linux, during initial LUKS setup, set a LUKS password. Then you can store it in a TPM module. Although this approach would slightly reduce security - if your login password is compromised, using TPM means there is no extra security layer to protect your machine. All an attacker needs is to steal your laptop and punch in your compromised login password.

But do I need all this?

The primary threat vector is gaining physical access to your machine. Your laptop is with you when you're out and about, all they need is a few moments where people aren't looking to swipe your laptop. If you enable disk encryption on your laptop, it'll be a property loss, but your data is safe.

But with PCs or machines that you don't move around - servers, homelabs, etc., you probably don't need to enable disk encryption. Assuming non-invited guests are not frequent or anywhere near your machines. But if you are expecting uninvited guests (read: attackers), enabling disk encryption would protect your data.

The only downside is enabling disk encryption requires a few extra setups and slightly more time before you can boot into a desktop. But compared to having your credentials compromised? It'll be more than worth it.