What's wrong with plastic? People seem to hate it in laptops and phones, but it has several advantages and only few disadvantages compared to glass and metal. It's lighter, cheaper, and usually protects innards better. I used to have Lumia phones with plastic cases for years, and they survived many drops - usually landed on an edge, which ended up with a dent, but not much more. The only advantages I see in other materials are aesthetics, heat conductivity (metal only) and scratch resistance (glass only).
How is having extra ports a bad thing?
Because Apple doesn't have them. So they must be bad.
ports put a limit on how thin the laptop can be. a VGA connection can't get smaller, an RJ-45 jack can't get smaller. the dimensions of the laptop define how realistically "portable" it may be, which is ostensibly the main argument for laptops in the first place.
My Panasonic CF-RZ5 weighs 1.6lbs, and sports VGA, HDMI, Ethernet, 3xUSB3, a headphone jack, a power socket, a 1920x1200 IPS display, and a removable battery. It is from 2016, and makes the idea of all of these features compromising portability questionable.
I'm happy to see the RJ-45, I don't care if it's thinner, my ~2011 mbp had one and thought it was a fine size (miss being able to reasonably upgrade the ram and hdd myself too). I'd much rather see another hdmi or dp/mini-dp over the vga though. Though the lack of a quality touchpad is the biggest omission for me... I hate all laptop keyboards, but the mbp touchpad is super nice.