They don’t cost that much. And there are cheaper options.

Most computers Apple sells are laptops. By a huge margin.

So what am I supposed to do? Put my laptop in the same spot every night, plug it in, plug in the drive, and then the next morning carefully make sure the drive is unmounted before I move my laptop anywhere?

That’s kind of ridiculous. Network storage works. Apple has supported it for years.

If they don’t want to support this, don’t let the OS do it. Until then, don’t break my backups.