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.)
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.