Interesting about the springs, I didn’t know that. In practice though, the opposite to everything you say seems to be true based on using many (many) of both connectors over the years. I’ve had a couple of disasters with USB-C ports breaking (on the device, not the cable), while I’ve never had anything go permanently wrong with Lightning sockets. Your point that it has delicate springs inside it sounds concerning but seems to be totally theoretical - you can see customer service staff in Apple stores frequently just whip out a SIM key or paperclip and waggle it about in a customer’s iPhone to clean it with total abandon. And I’ve always done this with mine, treating it very rough with metal paperclips, I’ve never worried about hurting the springs. And it has never, ever gone wrong for me. The evidence seems to be that Lightning is just much more resilient.

You say that cleaning out a USB-C port is safe, but I know it’s not, because of that little snap-off wafer inside, which has broken on me twice before. It’s not safe, I promise. Don’t do it unless you have a good warranty!