The magic that originally brought me into the Mac ecosystem, after a decade and a half of Windows and Linux, was that the work MacBook I received was the first time I had an actual portable computer. The battery life ("you mean it still has a useful amount of charge after 3 hours? WTF is this sorcery!?"), good-enough trackpad (which makes it like 5x better than the best trackpad I'd used before, all of which had me considering an external mouse a must-have for more than 5 minutes of work), and port selection meant I could pick up my laptop—just my laptop—and go, and be fine for most or all of the day, doing almost anything.

The dongle bullshit (and the USB-C "well yes it can do that but only if you have exactly the right cable, so you'd better bring a couple with you" thing) broke that simplicity, and put me back to having to make sure I had other crap with me, which was a shame.

Dragging their feet on moving iPad and iPhone over to USB-C, so they could at least share dongles & charging cables with Mac laptops, was/is salt the wound.