My MacBook Pro passed recently - will be replaced by a Mini, and those still have USB A and HDMI. Which means I still will have to use HDMI for my monitor to keep a USB C connector free as one will be allocated back-up.
The problem there is that its only HDMI 2.0 and doesn't support 5k or higher frame rates - if you're only connecting 4k@60Hz that's a non issue, and if the M3 Mini shows up it will probably have HDMI 2.1. HDMI is still a very current standard for connecting displays - it's certainly not "obsolete" or "legacy".
Also, bear in mind that you haven't been robbed of a third/fourth TB/USB-C port by those USB-A and HDMI ports: the M1/M2/M3 SoCs only have two TB/USB 3.2g2/USB4 controllers (4 on the Pro and Max). My guess is that the USB-As (limited to 3.1g1) come from spare I/O lines from the SoC (probably used for internal peripherals on the laptops) and the HDMI from an internal DP-only port that would have been used for the internal display on laptops.
My pet peeve with USB-C is its use as
the only port on desktops and full-sized laptops with room for multiple ports - on a phone, tablet, super-portable laptop or small peripheral you pretty much
need to have a single connector that does everything - via dongles/docks if necessary, but on a desktop/larger laptop there's plenty of space to keep power, I/O and display separate, avoiding this "if I plug my display into a USB-C I can't plug a SSD into it" dilemma*. In the Intel days these were all independent resources on the logic board so having them share a single port introduced an unnecessary bottleneck. With Apple Silicon, unfortunately, that bottleneck seems to have been baked into the CPU somewhat.
Apple seems to have got this back-to-front: they pushed USB-C/TB3 as the
only port on laptops where it caused problems until USB-C became more widespread, and then dragged there feet adding it to phones and small peripherals where it actually solved a problem (MicroUSB was rubbish, Lightning was proprietary and reaching its limits).
I don't think Apple are switching to USB-C because of the EU - they're just a bogeyman to blame for having to buy a new clock radio stand - they'd have needed a "Lightning 2" by now. Lightning only has two data lanes - it can't even do USB 3.0 without an active dongle (presumably because USB 3 needs a 3rd lane for USB 2 compatibility) and USB4, TB3/4 and full DisplayPort need 4 lanes (plus the 'slow lane' for USB 2 fallback). Maybe they could have produced a compatible Lightning 2 by making the plug truly 16 pin (its only 8 pins replicated on both sides) but that may have had mechanical issues because the "tongue" of the plug is the load-bearing part... plus it wouldn't qualify for Thunderbolt or USB branding. With the iPad Pro and - potentially - future top-end iPhones getting serious computing power, it made sense for those to go to Thunderbolt, at which point USB-C makes sense for the whole iDevice and peripheral range.
* Yes, it's convenient to have a single-cable docking solution for laptops but, for years, I had the
horror of using an Apple Cinema Display at work which meant connecting a 3-tailed cable with one Magsafe, one USB, one MiniDP plug and a separate Ethernet cable which must have wasted
3 whole seconds twice a day (oh the humanity!). It also gave me a horrible choice of putting up with
two cables on the desk or taking 2 minutes to bind them up neatly.
....and if one keeps buying stuff with anything but USB C connectors a similar scenario will remain for the longivety of ownerships. I find it a tad annoying that "future leaning Apple", that`s at least what they propagate, contributes to this both on the pherperial side and on Mac Mini/Studios. My MacBook Pro passed recently - will be replaced by a Mini, and those still have USB A and HDMI. Which means I still will have to use HDMI for my monitor to keep a USB C connector free as one will be allocated back-up.