Maybe for your personal monitors. A far more annoying problem is connecting to conference room projectors. My or still has conference rooms with nothing but VGA cables plugged in to the projector.
This is exactly why I'm 100% for the USB-C switch. I have 1 dongle that handles every video type to USB-C - VGA, DVI, HDMI, and even mDP. There's no reason for all 4 of those ports to be built into the computer on the off chance that I need one of them.
I have the opposite perspective. I'd like my $3000 device to have all the ports I'm likely to need over the lifetime of said device. Dongles and specific adapter cables are a pain.
But then we're back at the beginning of this conversation and you're saying you'd rather have a larger, bulkier, laptop that can accommodate several of these single-use ports. The entire conversation was related to why USB-C was a good/bad decision. I think it was a good decision because I have infinitely more flexibility than I'd have with what you're suggesting. Anything that needs to work over the "lifetime of said device" needs to be able to handle future technologies and having dedicated HDMI ports, for example, is not useful for that because even the HDMI spec has changed multiple times in the last few years.
Your HDMI argument falls a bit flat, since even the brand spanking new USB-C in the latest macbook pros don't support HDMI-2.0 in alt-mode. Instead you need to run them in Displayport and actually run a converter, which is hot and bulky, or you can't get 4k60.
Besides, I'm not fundamentally against dongles, if you REALLY need one because tech has changed or whatever then sure, but let's not require 5 just to operate your computer normally straight out the box.
I really don't see any disadvantage to having an HDMI port, a Type-A USB port and an SD card reader around for making the transition period to USB-C easier. Considering the compromises made to the keyboard, I don't buy that the ports were the thickness limit, either.
Then we'll have to agree to disagree. I've run several hundred presentations over HDMI with the dongle that I have and have been able to do several hundred more via VGA, DVI, etc. without that. Other than that, I don't have 5 dongles. All my devices and cables are USB-C now and it's of great benefit to me that I can be flexible and plug them in anywhere, chain them, get power from them, and essentially run them all off of 1 hub that only takes 1 cable to the computer. For me, USB-C is amazing.
