Nobody said that.

MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.

Luckily there are two lines: the Air and the Pro.

The issue people had was from 2016-2019, the Macbook Pros sacrificed a lot of usability for thinness, when that should only happen for the Airs.

I think the preference is to have a battery that can run a CPU that's compiling, AI-ing, or rendering for an entire day (16+ hours) without having to worry about where an outlet is or being tethered to a wall or be thermal throttled. Right now that's a volume tradeoff. If there was something that ran as fast for as long and was MacBook Air (or the last Intel generation) thin, I don't think anyone would complain.

I'd be fine with a thinner and lighter laptop if it was without compromises.

But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.

My old thinkpad was thicker but not heavier. Way more ports, didn't need dongles.