Your engineers are unwilling to use a dongle to connect to a monitor? Something that is so trivial to set up once and never deal with again sounds more like an attitude problem than a technical one.
Why not? You bought a cable for every monitor you'd ever connect to. The hdmi cable your monitor came with definitely didn't plug into your MBP from 2015.
While true it's beside the point that was made earlier on. The Parent complains about "dongles", but really it's not much different than having to plug a portable computer into all of the accessories that are there already, there's just something extra tacked on. It's not like other vendors and set ups are immune to this; my previous work place had a Dell contract and their desktops came with some stupid video card where there was only one out-put and the only way to get dual monitors was a Y splitter from Dell.
In custom setups, if your card isn't Dual [connection], you use an adapter for DVI or HDMI, and so on.
Apple does have a lot to answer for, and their idea of "dongle for everything" does get tiresome and Apple should be above that. But it's not like it's unique to Apple or even new in the computing world. This has been standard for a long time.
maybe you bought a laptop that stays in the exact same position and location for the foreseeable future.
for those who use it in more than one place, it's more than a minor annoyance.