There's a pretty simple solution. Use different form factors depending on capability, like we'd been doing for decades before this madness.

USB C is fantastic. Standardization is way better than needing several different types of cables for all your devices.

Only if you require all those different functionalities to be included.

Otherwise, you have a bunch of mystery cables that all fit but may or may not do what you think they do.

Making every cable look the same, making it a guesswork which cable is working for which use case is better than having separate cables?

The biggest issue with what USB-C has caused is that now instead of it being a port you can easily identify you have a port that can do anything and an anonymous cable that may or may not support the actual functionality of the port! The only real solution is to buy your own expensive cables stock and only really use the cord a device came with if you want to be 100% sure it will work.

Though even that isn't a complete fix because there are some hidden gotcha's like length limits for external docks, to get full speed out of an external GPU enclosure for example you're pretty much stuck either using a very nice cable (good luck determining which actually support it and which are just lying to you since manufacturers can claim any capabilities) or sticking with a very short cable limiting the utility.

Except we still have several different types of cables, now it's just not obvious what there different capabilities are

Standardization is great when it actually happens. USB C cables are anything but standardized.