People have complained about Apple removing things since they first removed floppy drives. They remove them not because of some misguided belief, but because it’s old tech. I have a MBP from 2012 still going strong. When laptops last that long a bit of future proofing is a bonus. If you swap laptops every other year then you obviously miss out on this benefit. PC manufacturers will start removing USB ports and if history is any judge we’ll see zero complaints about them doing it, just like with the floppy
There are two reasons the floppy drive isn't a very good comparison, in my opinion. The first is that floppy drive usage had already dropped dramatically because software was distributed on CDs and macs had been networked for years. So the use cases for floppies were a lot fewer and farther between, meaning it was less upsetting to people that Apple made the bold move of just dropping them. Also keep in mind that by this point, the Zip drive had absolutely taken over as the sneakernet of this era, and those were 100% aftermarket add-ons. The second reason the floppy is very different is that if you consider the tree of all the devices that are plugged into your mac, floppy drives are leaf nodes. Nothing else plugs into them, so removing them impacts nothing but floppy usage. Every day I plug in a DisplayPort monitor, an HDMI monitor, USB 2.0 yubikey, and USB 2.0 keyboard+mouse via a USB 2.0 hub. That's a lot of perfectly functional stuff to replace just because Apple jumped the gun on deciding USB-C had taken over.
Evidence that it hasn't: the hundreds of people walking around my workplace with gigantic USB 2.0 + HDMI + displayport dongles dangling from their laptops all the time, or starting meetings by saying "oh shit, i left my dongle in the other building. Can I borrow someone's so I can use the projector?"
