To be fair, VGA had 2 big ass screws on each side to hold the connection in. If you tightened them all the way down, the VGA connector was essentially part of the fucking machine at that point.
I remember wondering as a kid why those plugs needed to be screwed in like that. It seemed ridiculously overengineered.

It was! Back in the day, half the time the screws were tighter in the plug which caused the sockets to come out of the motherboard rather than unscrewing in many times during my desktop days. I fucking hated them!

Could at least straighten a bent pin, though…

I don’t know why I kept tightening them. I never found myself in a situation where the connector was falling out if they were left unscrewed.
Yup. When cheap PC clones came around, everyone had that one Com, LPT, or VGA port with the missing screw terminal. Fortunately you need zero of those for the port to actually work.
The pixels come out otherwise.
No hotplugging back then. If you pulled out the plug, gotta reboot. Idk if anything worse could happen, like damage to the hardware.