Before Apple went ARM, they weren’t perfect, but they weren’t the worst. You could swap RAM on iMacs, change out storage on Mac Minis. But as they adopted ARM, RAM was incorporated into the SoC. And while poor for interoperability, there are notable performance improvements in this system-in-a-package design. More so, they do allow for some storage upgrades with the current Mac Mini and Mac Studio, even if it’s still somewhat user-hostile.
As for the charging question at hand, yeah…they probably WANTED something stupid like they did with MFi certification on lightning cables, but it seems as though the EU has already warned them about that. Hopefully we’ll end up with a pretty nice usb-c experience!
No Windows server solutions? Synapse has Docker but I’ve had a hell of a time getting it up on my Win Server 2016 install.