It's so much worse than what it replaced because physical incompatibility meant you had no confusion. A VGA cable was a VGA cable, a power port was a power port, a ps/2 mouse was a ps/2 mouse.

The only thing it improved over was the hellscape if charging ports.

It's like a mountain range: the base is rock-solid, but the peaks (in speed, power, capabilities, even length) are standing apart.

And successfully scaling different peaks requires using different kinds of safety rope. Helpfully, the different ropes all look exactly the same.

Sounds like we should add some type of visual guide to help people realize which ropes to use.

Maybe make their physical shapes different enough so that you can't connect things which fail catastrophically together?

The thing is that they never fail catastrophically; t worst you get USB 2.0 level of interoperability.

But if you wan these top Mbps or W, or want 60 Hz 4k video, you may find out that not everything works with everything else, and proper cables play a crucial role, while being visually not distinctive at all.