Probably referring to FTDI-Gate, which is where FTDI shipped a driver that bricked counterfeit usb-serial converters.

I am not sure about a case with cables. But there was a semi famous case of FTDI USB drivers purposefully bricking fake USB counterfeit chips.

It was not that uncommon if you bought a cheap USB to serial or USB to TTL dongle online.

APC does this on UPSes. It’s an extremely bad practice that drives people crazy. They use a standard connector, like serial, RJ45, or USB, but with a non-standard pinout and give you a custom cable. God help you if you throw that cable in a box with other standard cables. And if you plug a standard cable into this non-standard port, the UPS panics and completely shuts down, including anything you have connected to it.

APC devices are generally pretty good, except for this infuriating and dangerous “feature”.

It’s almost 2020, and vendors still have this ridiculous idea that they can lock you into their proprietary ecosystem by doing stuff like this.

iPhones do this for the charging cable. They don’t brick as such, they just don’t charge. Sooner or later that gives you a brick.

Network switches do something like this iirc.