USB-C was supposed to simplify our lives, but instead it’s a total mess

No. I'm planning on keeping the stuff I have and leapfrogging the current pile of USB-C standards. Once they settle down, probably the week before the USB-D connector comes out, then I'll consider buying all new devices.

Yeah, I definitely understand the complaint. As I said in another comment, I think we're slowly approaching the point where you can mostly expect them to work the same. When the first Macbooks and other laptops with USB-C arrived, compatibility and adoption was awful, and we're finally getting to a point where things are less awful.

Would it have been better if they all worked exactly the same from day 1? Absolutely. Do I think we'll get to a point where USB-C is categorically better than what came before? Also yes.

This is a simple problem, and there's a simple solution.

Problem: Physical connectors previous encoded information about data/power transfer mode support. When USB C unified the physical connector, that information was lost.

Solution: Mandate visually encoded supported standards on the USB cable in colored ring form, a la resistors.

Make them plastic, so you can snip them off if the aesthetic bothers. But I should be able to reach into a bin of different USB C cables, and determine what each cable can and can't do.

The law here for specifications teams should be: assume the consumer is never going to read your spec. Their ability to use the technology shouldn't be contingent on their doing so.

Because it could have happened just as well with any other plug. It could have been a non-conforming micro-USB charging port.

Either way, it would have nothing to do with “the mess that is USB-C” (i.e. the inability to identify which of the various wire protocols that work over USB-C cables that a USB-C port follows/supports), because such a port isn’t following any of the USB-C-cable compatible standards.

It’d be like saying Nintendo hurt the mini-DVD format when they used non-compatible mini-DVDs in the GameCube. Those discs have nothing to do with the mini-DVD standard; they just happen to share a physical substrate and so a physical appearance. They’re not claiming to be mini-DVDs.

And nor does Nintendo claim the Switch’s charging port to be a USB-C port. In all the docs, it specifically says that it’s just a port for the Dock or the Switch AC charger to plug into. It just happens to share a form-factor.

Do you remember the days when every connector looked like a DB9 connector with only some of the pins populated? (E.g. the various game-controller ports on the Atari, Commodore, Amiga, etc.) Or later, when every connector looked like a PS/2 port, with only some of the pins populated (e.g. Apple Desktop Bus)? None of these were claiming to be the same type of cable or jack or socket. None of them were claiming cross-compatibility. They all just happened to share the same physical connector—because it was a cheap and plentiful, easy-to-source part to build your own proprietary cables and jacks and sockets in terms of.

Heck, do you know how many random different types of cables are terminated with TRS or RCA connectors? Would you blame your hairdryer for “destroying the audio ecosystem” because its wall-charger is terminated in an RCA jack, and you could theoretically plug said RCA jack into an iPod (probably frying it in the process)?

The outlier in all this isn’t USB-C, but rather the previous USB physical-connector standards. Pretty much nobody used those for anything other than USB devices. Probably because the connectors were 1. expensive as parts, and therefore not really worth using in your own project unless you specifically were trying to be a part of the USB ecosystem; and 2. weren’t designed to be physically capable of meeting the current-draw requirements that proprietary cabling standards would want to place on them.

In being both cheap and capable of high current delivery, USB-C connectors are just bringing us back from the temporary reprieve of USB-A/B, to the world of the 100 years before that, where a physical connector tells you nothing about what type of cable you’ve got, because every fly-by-night company uses any random connector for whatever they like.

You know how USB jacks and sockets had the USB icon on them? That was because the USB Consortium assumed people would do random things with the USB connector standard; and so the icon was meant to distinguish the USB connector as applied to a USB use-case. It never really became relevant in USB-A/B, but it’s actually relevant now in USB-C. That icon is what tells; not the shape of the socket.

All these additional standards stem from the simple fact that centralized governing bodies have no chance at making innovations as fast as independent private companies. I wish the USB IF would shift into higher gears.