If they were doing this then there wouldn't be any ports described as "USB 3.1" (see point 4). The version of the standard is not just irrelevant but actively misleading to use in marketing material.
> Marking the port type is redundant because USB has been good about giving every port type a very different physical silhouette.
On the port itself, sure, but if I'm buying a laptop online then it's pretty important what type of port it has, so saying "USB C T2" is a lot more useful than just "USB T2". How would I even know what silhuette the port has?
The two most important pieces of information are the type of port and the transfer speed. There are only a small number of possibilities for each, and the latter is a purely numeric value, so a letter/number pair is sufficient.
That gets to the edit I made at the end. The USB-IF Marketing group has never suggested marketing ports/cables as "USB 3.1". They've always preferred the "SuperSpeed {Bandwidth}" branding over "USB {SpecNumber}". There's a chart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB4#USB_3.x_.E2.80.93_4.x_dat...
(Admittedly, they are mixing messages by using "USB4 SuperSpeed {Bandwidth}" as marketing names for "SuperSpeed 20" and "SuperSpeed 40".)
But the fact that just about no one uses the USB-IF Marketing Names and instead reverts to easily confused "USB {SpecNumber}" branding is an interesting marketing failure by USB. (Not necessarily a technical failure of their specs.)
> On the port itself, sure, but if I'm buying a laptop online then it's pretty important what type of port it has, so saying "USB C T2" is a lot more useful than just "USB T2". How would I even know what silhuette the port has?
That's a slight goal post move from your previous comment about what to mark Ports/Cables. Sure, if you need to mark online materials you need to include port types. But it's still redundant on a physical port or cable to mark the port type when you are staring right at the port type.
The standard as a whole has a version number that increments with the entire standard document.
Port layouts are named A, B, C (and deprecated Micro-A, Micro-B, and Mini-A).
The transfer rates are now named: Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 1x2, and Gen 2x2. (These names are stupid, but they are names. Gen 1 is all the transport capabilities from USB 1.0 to USB 3.0 {including the now "classic" "superspeed"} and Gen 2 is new starting with USB 3.1 and the even worse named Gen 1x2 and Gen 2x2 are new starting with USB 3.2).
> Obviously this is too long to have on the port itself, so we can stick with just the port type and transfer speed (eg. USB C T2) as the short name.
Marking the port type is redundant because USB has been good about giving every port type a very different physical silhouette. USB A ports look nothing like USB B ports look nothing like USB C ports. (Arguably there are legitimate complaints that USB Micro-A and USB Mini-A had some visual at a glance issues in practice, but you couldn't insert the wrong cable into the wrong port.)
So yeah, that just leaves finding a better way to mark the ports (and cables!) with the transfer speed. "Gen 1", "Gen 2", "Gen 1x1", and "Gen 1x2" all take up a lot of space and maybe aren't the friendliest names to mark on/near ports/cables, but are in theory potentially the only bit of information that ports need to be marked that cannot be assumed by physical port shape. (ETA: Which the USB-IF Marketing names like SuperSpeed 40 and logos like an arc around the number 40 next to the USB symbol are designed to do, though the fact that people don't recognize them and they don't seem common enough in practice that people know they exist is a marketing failure more than a technical failure of the standards.)