It never made sense to me that the Mac Pro “had” to change away from this general design. A well-designed computer can be respected as art, but its primary purpose is still to be a computer. An all-in-one box that can be thrown in the car between gigs. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and your audio inputs, cameras, whatever it is you do with it. No fiddly external devices needed. The only complaints I ever heard are that it’s a bit heavy and the handles dig into your hands.
Post-Steve Jobs comeback Apple was able to pull off making their towers an art piece *and* a functional workhorse. Why did Tim Cook-era Apple overlook and fail to make this balance? They killed the market for the product and only just started to win some of those customers back with Apple Silicon, but not without making a mess of the driver infrastructure, and making discrete GPUs impossible. This is after they broke the cadence of yearly Mac Pro refreshes to make way for 6 years of the Thermal Corner™ cylinder model, making a bet (dual GPUs with custom cooling) that wasn’t that useful to its customers, and would overheat and die.
Why spend more to invest in the Mac platform when Dell would love to sell you a boring Windows tower that’s unopinionated and does what you need?