We would have been stuck with micro USB for eternity if it wasn't for Apple. I realise they may not have objected out of the kindness of their hart, but good thing they did.
Amending laws takes much less time than eternity. Lawmakers are people, they can process information and make changes when appropriate. You can be sure that the industry will not forget to remind them when a change seems sensible.
Why?
Because either a new standard is not allowed. Or it is allowed, but then highly probably just one… and the central planning way. One standard/product is worked on, one is accepted as the successo.
No selection in the wild of the one that survives (depending of what we talk about, the survivor is sometimes the one that is technically better, sometimes it is the one that is cheaper, or faster in bandwith or latency or prettier, or …).
This sometimes work ok for 1-2 successors, but the more times pass by, the more central planing (or lack of free market) fails.
If one is very honest it has to see both sides of it.
Both has their pros and cons (not equally weighted though).
The regulated way has to be done as rarely as possible (very hard to decide when it is a good idea…)
Most of Europe already has a standard 230V plug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko). It would probably be easier to get a unified 230V power plug than to change the USB-C port again after a decade.
“Until 1987, mains voltage in large parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria and Switzerland, was 220(±22)V while the UK used 240(±24)V. Standard ISO IEC 60038:1983 defined the new standard European voltage to be 230(±23)V.”
Aside from Apple, the voluntary standards process was working. No one else was still resisting USB-C. Can you name some examples?
USB-C is not royalty-free, either.
I don't think it's too expensive if you consider the environment impact not to mention the bad user experience caused by multiple chargers. I also believe at certain point the economies of scale should make it less expensive.
It would be so much nicer if we got one standard that covers everything.
And my latest trimmer is actually using micro-USB, though with an additional plastic plug preventing the use of the charger on another device. But I can charge the trimmer with any other Micro-USB charger.
Implemented with durable materials and good machining practices, USB C can last a lifetime of plug cycles. The standard lends itself to extremely durable design relative even to the tank that is USB A. The C standard is for 10,000 cycles, but this is only technically a minimum. USB A only specifies 1,500 technically, but A connectors have been manufactured that last 20,000. This all alludes to the idea that USB C is just a standard, and it doesn’t indicate exactly how the connector is designed.
The situation with bandwidth is similar. Bandwidth has many other bottlenecks. The speed with which data is written to a flash drive, for example, has nothing to do with the port itself anymore. Similarly to the durability issue, it’s going to be a long long time before the functionality of USB C is associated with more than 80 GB/s.
Seriously, before this law was put in place, Europe had been asking companies to agree on a common charging port for more than a decade.
The first Memorandum of Understanding on the subject was signed in 2009. Amusingly Apple did sign it before deciding to simply ignore it. That was followed by a directive in 2014 and an impact assessment in 2018.
Despite these repeated warnings, Apple spent the decade lobbying against a common port while collecting a tidy sum with the Made For Iphone initiative.
The EU didn’t mandate by hubris. It just had to. We need a law because if we don’t have one there will always be companies reverting to proprietary ports. They just can’t resist the easy money.