I guess you’d probably need a UPS for a powered dock, I don’t know. The power is out too infrequently where I live for it to be an issue and it’s nice for the dock to be able to charge for one cable swapping between machines.
4k@27in may be too small pitch, but QHD@27in would be too pixelated. Especially on macOS that does NOT allow turning off antialiasing.
I'm currently using the 400nit HP Z24m G3 @ 2560x1440 @ 24in with my 16GB MBA M1, the colours are absolutely amazing compared to the cheaper Lenovo monitors.
Firefox works great, because it lets you turn off antialiasing, but there's no way to turn it off in Brave or Chrome, which results in super washed out and blurry text everywhere.
Honestly, macOS is not production ready at this point. Data loss because you have to use an external SSD through a dock, poor monitor support with regressions after moving to Apple Silicon, no ports for anything, inadequate RAM/storage that cannot be upgraded in any way besides the external SSD through a dock with a UPS.
Basically, the most simple things are super complicated.
Didn't it used to be the opposite with the Macs, where they were actually simpler and more flexible?
Laptops in general haven’t been flush with ports for a very long time now, unless we’re talking about workstation laptops and sometimes gaming laptops. I have an old late-00s 15.4” Precision that has more ports than a lot of consumer desktops and entry-level motherboards these days, but by and large laptops come with maybe a third as many at most. Apple laptops haven’t been replete with ports like that since the PowerBook G3 “Pismo” was EoL’d back in 2000. People who need that many ports usually get a tower of some kind.