Is this a frequent occurrence for you? I have a 6 year old MBP and all of the ports still work great. I would naively guess that P(port breaking) << P(dongle breaking).
Ironically, that reader didn’t support microSD cards used by my audio recorder (Tascam DR-05), so once I lost the microSD to SD size adapter (which happened very quickly) I had to use a universal memory card reader dongle anyway.
I never sent it for repair: this was my daily driver so I had to have a backup machine in meantime, but when I got another laptop I simply switched to it.
My latest USB-C SD/microSD reader dongle feels surprisingly sturdy, though admittedly it is liable to getting lost (it’s been a year and it did not happen yet, but I’m sure it will at some point).
I’d say definitely P(port breaking) < P(dongle breaking or getting lost), but on the other hand port breaking has higher cost.