On that, I would warn that the expansion cards protect only against physical damage to the ports. It’s still quite possible for the ports to fail, and those failures can easily extend to the mainboard, so that replacing the expansion card does not help.
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Eventually though the USBC port that an extension card plugs into will die 
But yeah for this reason I like expansion cards. If you think of them as, “It’s just a USBc port plugged into a USBC port,” they don’t make sense, but if you think of them as, “a replaceable 14$ usbc port that I plug and unplug into 10,000 times, and then toolessly replace when it breaks,” it makes a LOT more sense.
That there’s first-party dongles you can plug in to turn your USBC port into something else integrated with the laptop is just icing on the cake.
Also it’s nice to sometimes change which side is which for ports, e.g. if I want my external keyboard plugged in I have two usbc ports on the left and everything else on the right.
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I thought I don’t need expansion cards, until a few days ago I found my laptop’s USB4 port broken, with VCC shorted to (S)GND. It is still possible, but much less probable, with expansion cards (at least the inner ones are protected).
The expansion cards should have rounded corners, to make the chassis to have rounded sockets, reducing or eliminating fatigue cracks.
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