I have no idea why the standard isn't mandating clear markings (eg something like the bands on resistors, or whatever that works for color blind folks too).

I'm pretty sure the USB Implementers Forum is controlled by interests that think they benefit from things being confusing.

At least, I can't think of any other explanation for allowing 1.5Mbit/sec and 12Mbit/sec devices to call themselves 'USB 2.0'

There was a comment about that here on HN a few months back and that kind of convinced me that it's to enable the very-very cheap gadgets to be at least compliant. Cheap chips, slow clocks, but at least they follow the protocol. At least that's the theory.

Because nobody would follow them anyway.

Apple wants white cables, some people want red, blue or yellow cables, so on. And the connectors are so small there is no place to put anything on them.

That's not true. It'd help a lot. Apple can use their cable and simply not say that it's USB3/TypeC/FancyX. No one would care if it would actually work.

But at least there were clear markings for those who care.

It would take up about 2 cm on each end of the cable, a set of bands, like a barcode. It doesn't even have to be that strikingly different in color.

I just want to find out who at Dell is responsible for perpetuating the use of black markings on a dark-grey background.

Yes, to me that's the worst part of the USB-C family of standards: it expects the operating system to tell the user "you're plugging it wrong" (and it does have ways in the protocols to detect all these cases, like using a 2.0-only cable to a 3.x device, or the host not supporting the desired alternate mode, or a lower grade cable when both ends could use a higher grade cable), but that requires the operating system to care about it, and doesn't help at all before you buy and unpack the cable/device.

> it's usb-c and be done with it...

It's even worse: most cables I've seen in stores labeled "USB-C cable" are actually USB-A to USB-C cables. Other than these, so far I've only seen an unlabeled USB-C to USB-C cable, and a Sony brand USB 2.0 USB-C to USB-C cable, both costing around R$ 100 (way more expensive than I'd expect for a basic 2.0-only cable).

My experience watching a shop deal with transitioning to new Macs was that it was impossible to actually know a macbook+cable+device combo would work until you tried it. You could research all you wanted and there was still a chance it'd fail, or be glitchy and weird, unless you found someone with exactly the same combo to confirm that it worked fine.

Ditto dongles to connect to older devices. Will it work? No way to know, just try it and find out.