We are specifically talking about Mac laptops. Laptops are used with HDMI in a few very specific scenarios where it is annoying or not practical to just buy and use the $6 cable you need.
...as opposed to the “few very specific scenarios“ where you
turn up at a meeting carrying two 5k displays, a rack mount pro audio interface and a RAID enclosure, and can’t plug in your powered Thunderbolt 4 hub into AC because the roadie only packed a 4-way power strip instead of 6-way in the giant flight case that you already need...
Nobody is asking for Thunderbolt to be removed completely (although I’d personally dance on the grave of USB-C, if only TB wasn’t the only game in town for external PCIe) - just for a couple of USBA and/or HDMI ports as well, primarily for convenience ”on the road“, for data projectors, USB sticks etc. Even if that means losing 1/2 out of TB ports (and only Apple knows if/why that that may be necessary) I’ve yet to see any explanation of what practical facility people think they are going to lose.
Do you really need more than 2 TB3 ports
in a meeting (esp. when you’ve got alternatives for power, display and plain old USB)? And, on the desktop, even if your devices don’t have daisy chain ports you can now have hubs that can turn those two ports into 4-6 (with at least the same total bandwidth as the old 4-port, 2 controller MBP). One of the big advantages of the One True Port was you could have
single cable docking (which has been improved by the move to one-controller-per-port and the ability for peripherals to use both DO streams) - for which you only need one port.
Seriously - people here gone blue in the face describing the scenarios where HDMI, USB-A, SD, MagSafe would be useful. What are the uses of having 80Gbps of i/o bandwidth and support for 4 external displays
on the train - given that nobody is denying you that capability - if not more - on your desk?