Best PC Laptop less than $1000 for young gamer?

Well, the Lenovo Legion 5 Gen 6 looks pretty compelling for around $800, with a 3060 video card, if your youth can wait 4+ months for it to ship.

Walmart has the previous gen with 1060 card for $700. That's what I ended up ordering.

This is kinda a wild suggestion, but you could get a really kitted-out Steam Deck at that price point if you wanted. It has full docking capability to turn it into a desktop if you'd like, and with the money you have left over you could buy some peripherals like a monitor, keyboard, mouse, headphones etc. IIRC the top-end Deck model is ~$600, so you could easily fit such a setup under 1000 bones.

If they're serious about gaming just get a desktop build and buy a chromebook/ipad for school, much cheaper and will go further. Even the best laptops have noticeable decline after 2-3 years.

It’s not worth spending big on a gaming laptop. You really want a discrete GPU.