Most people want their data protected or recoverable. Most want a computer with a variety of ports, specifically for our existing peripherals. Most don’t care about a MILLIMETER of thickness, it’s not worth it.
Online syncing is not a solution to everything. Shame we can’t discuss the issues here.
You're also making the strawman argument that removing the recovery port was done to save millimetres of thickness and that's clearly false because the 2018 laptop is the same size as the 2016-2017 MacBook Pro which includes the port.
For the record I'm not convinced by the current Apple lineup so I haven't upgraded but that is a different discussion.
Apple makes it almost unbelievably easy to do regular encrypted backups and restore from them. I've used Time Machine backups to restore lost/accidentally deleted data many times, and to "restore" to multiple new Macs over the years, for example. Backups are and always have been the correct answer to "what if this specific disk/machine goes irrecoverably bad".
Meanwhile, the reason they can't recover the data for you here is because they implement the one correct answer to "what happens if I lose all my decryption keys". Which is "you're out of luck, we don't have a backdoor to recover the data in that case".