I'm with you on everything else (I'll be the first to admit that I love trashing Apple at every opportunity I get these days), but I find it weird that people criticize the dongle thing so heavily. Surely standardizing everything to USB-C would be an example of the exact thing you're talking about? (keeping it simple and functional). Somebody has to make the switch first, and if Apple didn't, wouldn't we all be using dongles anyway, just the other way round?
I'm happy to cop a bit of temporary pain in the pursuit of standardization. It's the one thing that actually isn't shitting me about my work Macbook.