Up until this year I've had exactly 3 USB-C cables: Nintendo Switch, which is always plugged into its dock; laptop charger, also always plugged in at my desk; and phone charger. No real room for the mistakes they're describing.
Nintendo Switch is non-compliant [1] so you've already seen (2) it just hasn't been a big enough problem to be visible to you. I suspect a big reason for that is the Switch is a wall<->USB-C charger so you don't try to connect it between many USB-C devices.
I was responding to the "out for over a decade" part; how long they've been available doesn't mean much if they haven't been very common for consumer electronics for that long. Up until this year I've had only 1 such cable, my phone charger, that could get mixed up in any way... and that one couldn't be mixed up because I didn't have a second unused cable to mix it up with.
I've been using USB-C on basically every consumer electronics device I've used over nearly the past decade. Over the years I have accumulated:
1. A laptop with a USB-C power/data/DisplayPort port
2. A phone with a USB-C power/data port
3. Multiple USB power banks which use a single USB-C port for both charging and discharging
4. A smartwatch with a dock that uses USB-C
5. Multiple flashlights with USB-C charging
6. Multiple bluetooth speakers with USB-C charging
7. A pair of earbuds with a case that uses USB-C charging
8. Dozens of various USB-C cables and power bricks, some of which came included with the products above
So far I've had zero issues with any of them. Sure, not all cables support full charging speeds/data rates, but generally speaking I can just plug things in and expect them to work in some fashion.
Maybe to iPhone users USB-C feels like a new thing? To everyone else it's been a mature ecosystem for a long time now, which is why a lot of the comments in this thread commenting about it as if it's a brand new, unproven technology seem very strange to me.
Edit: Just remembered I also have an air duster and an electric toothbrush that use USB-C. Those didn't immediately occur to me because I don't have to charge them often. There might be more I'm forgetting...
I'm an Android user, and for your points 5, 6, 7, and 8 all of mine are USB-A to Micro USB (except for a flashlight bought this year which came with a USB-A to USB-C cable, and I use wraparound bluetooth headphones instead of earbuds and get the feeling those designs are just extremely rarely updated).
No displayport or smartwatch here, and my power banks all came with A-to-micro or A-to-C cables (mostly the former) - there's a convention in that ecosystem that power flows from the A connector to the other end.
> there's a convention in that ecosystem that power flows from the A connector to the other end
That's not just a convention, it's a vital part of the specification :)
USB-C devices go to significant lengths to make it hard for users to violate that invariant using an unsafe combination of otherwise safe adapters – that's why there is no USB-C-to-A adapter, for example (because that would let you build an A-to-A cable, and USB-A hosts are not required to detect possible loops/short circuits; USB-C hosts are).
I mean, I feel like they prefer to keep using A-to-C or A-to-Micro because of power flow instead of packaging C-to-C (and from some quick Amazon searches, C output still looks rare, the majority of what I'm seeing is C input and A output on the power bank itself).
Almost always, as I've noticed only after grabbing a friend's power bank and a C-to-lightning cable for a day trip...
I believe an USB-C device port is easier to implement than a host/power supply port, since the host is only allowed to supply Vbus after ensuring that it's connected to a device (by actively probing the resistor connected to the CC pins etc.), whereas a device port only needs to present that resistor. After all, even a passive C-to-micro-B cable can do that.
Yes, I have seen some products still using micro-B. I've generally just avoided them because I don't want to have to carry another type of cable, so maybe that's colored my perception a bit of how widespread USB-C usage is.
For the products you've purchased that came with an A-to-C cable, have you tried using them with a plain C-to-C cable? In my experience usually that will "just work". (Maybe there are some power banks out there that don't support outputting power through their USB-C port. If those exist I've managed to avoid them so far.)
Just tried plugging my phone into one of those power banks like that: The phone recognized it was plugged into USB, but didn't start charging. The light on the power bank did turn on though, so I redid it with a USB power meter: The power bank was sucking power from my phone at about 3.4 watts.
> The power bank was sucking power from my phone at about 3.4 watts.
At least on Android, there's an option to change the power direction (IIRC, it's in the same place where you choose the data connection mode). I have to use that option to switch the direction whenever I use the USB-C cable to charge my phone from my laptop, otherwise it tries to charge the laptop from the phone.
I know I have that option for wireless charging, but at least for this power bank I can't switch the direction. It says on that screen that the connection is controlled by the other device and fails to switch.
The comment you're referencing is claiming that the Switch is non-compliant at the power delivery protocol level.
Assuming that that's true, this has nothing to do with being wired incorrectly, nor is it an implementation mistake that's facilitated by the design of the USB-C plug being reversible. It could literally happen with USB-PD over USB-A/B.
