Rather, the cable became universal and the protocols diverged. But I’m fairly sure the situation will be fixed by the adoption of USB-PD as the ultimate power standard. As all the other standards (QC and else) are including it in their own. And the remaining HDMI devices will be phased out in a decade or so.

Then you’ll need to only care about the wattage rating when charging devices. Seems like future for me.

What about bandwidth? There are 10Gbps, 20Gbps and 40Gbps cables, along with "wattage" (really, amperage/current).

Both will continue to go up.

It's worth noting I suppose that newer USB power delivery standards are scaling voltage rather than amperage/current to deliver more power to the device.

The pins are specified for 1.25A each yielding 5A and I believe the 5A cable specification came at the same time as 20V with the 100W power delivery specification.

Every power increment since then has been a voltage rather than current increment.

Good point, I was aware that newer USB-C PD standard offers bigger power delivery (up to 240W, I think), but I didn't know it was achieved through increased voltage.

That means it goes up to 48V DC, so that's certainly curious, thanks!

I don't think this is anymore than growing pains. Do you guys seriously misremember how terrible usb-a ports were? Now they're the gold standard apparently.

I've never seen a USB-A port or cable connector break physically or become loose fit. At most wires inside cheap cables snapped, but that's unrelated to the port. On the other hand USB-C port (host part, not the cable) quality is dogshit. All my type-c devices slowly degrade their ports over time. At 3-4 years mark they are trashed.