What's interesting here is, why is your definition of convenience more important than others' definitions. who "wins" the definition of "convenient?" Answer: nobody.
Your convenience of being able to connect on either side counters the convenience of many others who agree with my definition of not having to worry about safely securing the position of my MacBook on the desk since MagSafe provides a hugely beneficial function of protecting against accidental pulling from the desk to the floor *as well as* the ability to connect automatically with one finger holding the cable and not have to use the other hand to steady/hold/reach the MacBook to plug in the USB-C cable.
Further, my definition of convenience is having a pro device with more than 1 type of port, enabling freedom to carry around my charged device without adapters/ports such as required by a USB-C port-only device. One would think my favoring MagSafe counters that view, but hey, it goes to show you that nobody fully "wins" the definition of convenience contest. The unique functional benefits a MagSafe port/cable provides far outweighs having a unique cable/charger that I leave at home 99% of the time, so I don't have to carry it around, harkening back to my preferring a MacBook that's as all-in-one as possible so I can walk up to most different/varying hardware in my home and various other locations in life where the cable already exists, waiting to be plugged in instantly without having to scramble for an adapter/dongle.
Everyone has different definitions of convenience and preferred function.
100% with you here.
For me, convenience is about having something ready when I didn't plan for it.
Does my new car have cupholders in the door as well as the ones my old car had in the console? Yes.
Did I ever plan on using more than 4 cup holders in a car? No. Not until covid and I put wet wipes on those nice big-gulp sized door cupholders.
Usually the MagSafe charger will have a home, a home where you're worried about dropping your laptop or the dog whisking under your legs. Like the couch.
At the desk with your fancy docking station, USB C makes most sense. 1 cable for video, charging and data.
With the new purported machine that allows those options, I have the best of both worlds.
An SD card reader makes sense also when you'd least expect it. For me, it's vacation. At home I have SD card readers all over the place but on vacation, I'm not even bringing a mac charger, just my 2015 13" so I have somewhere to dump extra photos or upload to a blog.
Same with HDMI. If the entire office had a bunch of laptops with no ports, the office would just leave a dongle connected to the conference room TV or projector. But laptops have HDMI ports, just not the newest batch of MBPs, so those without ports had to carry their laptop and a dongle. Stupid.