I guess you could use the same argument to say you're buying less when you buy your laptop. It's just arbitrary data I/O through USB with the software level interpreting it. They don't have to ship a DAC or wifi radio (if they actually omitted that) or... whatever you call the component that's part of a GPU that converts to HDMI - instead they offload that to the dongle or peripheral. In effect your device is just slowly being whittled down to a processor to USB bridge.

The headphone and USB ones are the ones I hate the most. My "flagship" phone doesn't work with any of my ~15 pairs of headphones (mostly earbuds but a few actually nice ones) without an adapter. Booting up a laptop into a nix OS that doesn't have wpa_supplicant etc. installed, no ethernet dongle or ethernet port, that's about to be annoying.

This is more about laptops/phones than desktops btw. Normal sized desktops usually still ship with every port, plus one or two USB-C's these days.