Time and technology moves on - get some adapters and move on with it - the type C ports are far more capable and pleasant to use, legacy things work just fine with a C-A adapter.
Yeah, I'm not a great USB-C fan, but it's getting better-established now (and there are cheap A-C dongles that - unlike some early cheap/fake USB-C cables - probably won't let the magic smoke out). Still, I've got a lot of USB-A 2/3 stuff - bought as recently as last year - that would gain
no advantage from being connected to a USB-C port so any extra cost is annoying. Even a lot of new, lower-cost USB-C stuff is just USB 3 and will run just as well on a USB-A port.
The real problem has been Mac
laptops stripping off HDMI, USB-A, magsafe, etc. which then had to be done via as few as 2 Thunderbolt ports - the problem then wasn't that the ports were USB-C it was that there weren't enough USB-
anything for some of us without getting a hub/dock - plus there's never been an all-USB-C/3.2 equivalent of the good old, cheap'n'cheerful 8-10 port USB 3 type A hub (there's now a
few 4-port pure USB-C hubs around) and although those work perfectly well via a USB-C host port they don't exactly create an incentive for switching to USB-C cabling...
That hasn't been so bad with Mac desktops which (aside from the M1/M3 iMac) have kept their USB-A and Ethernet ports alongside as many TB ports as the chip supported. Plus, on a desktop, you can plug in a dongle and forget it, unlike a laptop where it's another fiddly gizmo to forget to pick up). The redeeming feature of the M4 Mini is that, cf the M2 Mini, the Ethernet and HDMI ports have been kept, the USB-A ports have been "turned into" front USB-C ports and the base M4 has
gained a TB4 port. So, a few C-to-A dongles and it's good to go.
The glass-half-empty-and-now-mounted-underneath-the-table side is that the M4 Pro has
lost a Thunderbolt port (and consequently a USB-anything port) c.f. the M2 Pro and that, on both models, the front ports have come at the expense of rear ports so more people will have to trail wires for permanently-connected devices around the front. (C.f. the Studio where the front ports are
extra c.f. the Mini). Even the M4 Mini
could have had a 4th TB port (either extra or in place of one of the front USB-C/3 ports) since the M4 iMac clearly shows that this is possible with the M4.
