on site at a client fresh after they started upgrading people to USB-C/thunderbolt MBPs/Airs...
Very quickly meetings started with question of "who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort? We would like to start in 15s instead of 15 minutes of fighting with dongles..."
Anecdotes are not data. I can easily counter yours with mine:
I use such a dongle a lot whenever I am presenting on conferences etc, and have been doing so for many years (even before the all-out for USB-C/Thunderbolt on MacBooks, there were no VGA ports, while many projectors still were; now I see a lot of HDMI, but still need the adaptor).
And I habe yet to have a single issue caused by that! Sure, damaged VGA cables and other weirdness, but never ever anything tracing back to the dongle.
In the same time I helped lots of people who struggled with their laptops with builtin VGA/HDMI Granted, usually not the laptops fault but rather PEBKAC / or people not knowing how to control Windows / Linux. Doesn't really matter: my point is that I see zero correlation between dongle usage and projector troubles.
Yes they are. The singular form of data is datum, not anecdote.
A personal experience is a data point. A 2nd hand story may well be an anecdote. "I have this and use it for that" is very much data in this case.
Is it enough to make product design decisions? No. Should Apple throw it out as an outlier? I would argue no - to think one person is a special snowflake with a unique problem is a mistake too.
HDMI to VGA conversion, even through displayport connector, is much simpler topic than properly handling USB-C feature negotiation, and as I mentioned in another comment, it was common for USB-C dongles to exhibit problems, especially on macOS (non-Apple branded dongles tended to have better success rate on non-mac systems, Apple-branded dongles were consistently problematic on everything).
Usual case was that with dongles, the display wasn't detected, at all, and having spent quite a bit of time fiddling with it, it didn't seem fixable.
My org has an entire batch of OEM USB-C to HDMI dongles which work great on Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft laptops but will reliably cause Macs to crash and reboot within 5 minutes.
Very quickly meetings started with question of
"who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort?
We would like to start in 15s instead of 15
minutes of fighting with dongles..."
I don't understand this.
There are plenty of arguments against against going all-in on USB-C and forcing people to buy/carry multiple dongles. I don't like dongles myself! I still use a (pre-USB C) 2015 MacBook Pro, partially for that reason. I greatly prefer common ports such as HDMI to be built right into the laptop.
But "15 minutes of fighting with dongles?" Even if there's some comic exaggeration here, I don't understand.
Of all my gripes with Mac laptop dongles, "fighting" with them is not on the list. They are as plug and play as it gets. No drivers, etc... I hate carrying them but they're not exactly difficult to use.
The only way I can imagine people "fighting" with dongles is if they were nontechnical users who had difficulties simply plugging a cable in.
The reality was that quite often the dongles did not work properly. Using official Apple USB-C AV dongle (with USB-C, USB-A and HDMI) had people scrambling for "oh, maybe this one will work", screens randomly not displaying, etc.
I personally strongly suspect that they had a broken batch of dongles, seeing as how trying to use them on other systems often resulted in display detection issues too.
Then there was of course "oh, I forgot the HDMI dongle"/"Someone took the one that was in the meeting room" and so on.
The end result was that it soon become normal for people to push against updating the laptops.
Apple dongles normally work really well, which combines with the RDF to make people not believe stories like this until it happens to them.
Paraphrasing what I said in another comment, dongles are flaky. If yours aren't, congratulations, but that doesn't mean other people are lying or that they don't know how things work.
Unless you happen to have a cheap 3rd party dongle, use 2.4GHz wifi, and have to have internet access while doing your presentation or whatever. (3rd party dongles often have bad shielding and it interferes with 2.4GHz signal, it's a pretty widespread issue. You cannot really "fight it," though, you need to get another dongle.)
I worked in multiple companies that used streaming rather than physical connections for meeting presentations, and they were always so much worse and less reliable than just using a cable, dongle or not. Best case scenario it worked but there was a several second lag. There were a few meeting rooms that had the old fashioned physical hookups and those were always fought after because at least they worked reliably.
The last reliably streamable setup I've seen involved Plan B, a system built on top of Plan 9, and it was far on the weird side of the universe.
Many "streamable" options often end up actually using HDMI dongles, if working at all. Or work with very limited set of systems (the weird apparently undocumented reverse-RDP for projectors in Windows, intel-proprietary streaming, etc.)
Very quickly meetings started with question of "who has a laptop with real HDMI/DisplayPort? We would like to start in 15s instead of 15 minutes of fighting with dongles..."