Restoring a Modern Mac Laptop from an External Backup Drive Is it possible to "re-clone" a modern mac laptop (i.e. no removable hard drive) from an external (non Time Machine) hard drive?

That is, I'm about to buy a new Mac laptop for the first time in 5 years, and I'm reviewing my backup strategy.  I've typically kept an up to date external hard drive with a recent version of my machine cloned (via a program like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Clone), and if I ran into hard drive failures I could just pop the cloned drive in my laptop and be back up and running right away (restoring files from between the last clone and failure for other, external backup sources)  

It's my understanding modern mac laptop don't have removable hard drives -- it's all SSD chips permanently attached to the mother board. It's also my understanding Thunderbolt doesn't have an equivalent to Firewire's target disk mode.

So, if my new Mac laptop fails and Apple gives me a replacement laptop (or I buy a replacement laptop), is there a way to take this fresh machine and re-clone its hard drive so it matches what's on my external backup drive?  Or am I left manually copying files from my backup?
I think the 'modern equivalent' of your anticipated disaster recovery scenario could still be done by CCC, with caveats.

Receive new machine, ready with Recovery partition &amp; brand new OS, clone CCC boot partition back to new boot partition. Assuming parity with machine/drivers etc, i.e. like for like, then I foresee no issues.

The same maybe couldn't be said if the new machine was different, newer - as you cannot anticipate the new architecture - for that you'd need Time Machine, to be certain.