Just when I was about to reconsider buying a MacBook if they upgrade the keyboard on the next version.
When I travel on holiday or business I usually take an Apple TV and a HDMI cable. Bring your own media, vs. the hotel setups which are usually awful.
It is common for hotels to use WiFi which redirects you to an interstitial page to accept terms and conditions, input your room number and last name, select a WiFi plan and duration. Unfortunately the Apple TV doesn’t support these kinds of network setups — but you can solve this via your MacBook.
Unplug the Apple TV, switch the laptop to its MAC address. Associate to the WiFi, hop through the WiFi login flow, reconfigure back to the normal hardware address and then power up the Apple TV — works great.
Not being able to do that is frustrating, and represents a reduction in the functionality of the MacBook (to me).
Changing your MAC address as a part of this convoluted workaround is not a normal way to go about solving that problem. People aren't supposed to have to know how to change a MAC address or ever be expected to do it.
A streaming device should definitely be able to handle a captive portal. Roku 4 with Roku OS 7 or above can handle captive portals.