Typical Apple move.
It's not about performance.
If a 2018 MacBook Air can do it, how can any retina MacBook Pro not be about to do it performance wise??
Not to mention 2013 Mac Pro
Do you know exactly how Sidecar works? You might be right, but if they're using any newer wireless features or newer features in the intel CPU (raw performance aside), it might not be possible to work on a 2013 for example. One possibility is hardware support for whatever screen compression they're using.