That works right up until the cell tower goes down too. Then the dongle is a fancy USB decoration, and Starlink Mini, clunky as it is, still has one big advantage: your backup path isn't sharing the same failure mode, which is the whole point even if the setup are uglier and the power draw is worse.

100%. In my area unfortunately my ISP shares the same infra as my mobile provider. Many times they’ve gone out together.