> dongle

There's your problem. Dongles = cheap hardware to patch missing pieces of your expensive hardware. It's hard to find good ones even if you want to. One of the big reasons so many of us hated the TouchBar era of Macbooks was the reliance on dongles, which inevitably flake out at the worst times possible and cause weird bugs when you're trying to concentrate.

Heh, yeah, I had a Thinkpad with one of those PCMCIA cards that had the pop-out RJ-45 jack. It was great, but it was persnickety and would go "pfffbbblt" on the regular.

The best Ethernet dongle ever was the AAUI ones you used to have to use on old Macs.