Not sure about prefer, but indifferent at this point. The few places I might have needed to connect to HDMI (like a conference room) have all permanently attached a usb-c connector at this point. Adding the sdcard back is ok, but is superfluous at my desk because I have a dock (single cable connect at my desk is very nice). I also already carry a small usb-c -> sdcard reader so I can bring photos directly into LR on my iPad Pro.

MagSafe looks like a great return at first, but having used the M1 MBA for a year I've learned that I almost never plug into power in random places anymore. It's a bit like the plug on the bottom of mouse doesn't matter when you do it so infrequently. My MBA ends up almost exclusively charged from the dock on my desk, so the big advantage of MagSafe isn't there anymore.

And for these other ports, we lost a usb-c port. Probably not that big of deal since I've been living with 2 for a year, but it is a tradeoff to consider.

It's pretty similar though - instead of SD card into computer, it's SD card into reader into computer. Have to do this for micro SD cards in some way/shape/form anyways.

This may be a, "everything is amazing and no one is happy" sort of situation. I think all my cameras connect wirelessly to my Mac and my iPhone anyways. I can copy/paste text/images/whatever across the two as well and that's just magic when it comes to casual content creation.

If using the laptop mostly in a stationary place, but occasionally taking it to meetings (or just around the house), the dongle life is okay - means just one cable to plug in when I come back. Of course it would still be better to have a few extra ports on the device itself, there's no getting around that.