dx1Having separate dongles for network, audio, video etc. is even worse than just having specific cables for each
If you don’t have a dongle, the dongle is basically just hidden inside (a chip on the main board or an extension card). Being able to add dongles is a very easy way to quickly add things like wifi. Otherwise you’d have to open the PC and mount a card and the number of slots inside is also limited. So yeah, builtin is good, but also no, dongles can be better. It’s just a different option.
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 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.
Booting up a laptop … that doesn’t have wpa_supplicant etc
If you french fry when you pizza you’re gonna have a bad time.
Seriously though, if you want to use wifi without some sort of supplicant you’ve fucked up.
You can put it on, but at that point you’re with reinstalling the system or moving packages over on a thumb drive. Huge pain.