It turns out both simplified our lives dramatically, and both require you to do a bit of research before plugging things in.
If you don't want to brick your expensive devices, buy approved chargers. No different than being able to buy cheap knock-off batteries for devices off ebay. Will they work most of the time? Sure. Are you risking bricking your device or burning down your house using that $25 laptop battery off ebay? Absolutely.
The USB-C specification is the physical specification. All the other stuff is a USB specification but it has nothing to do with USB-C.
https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_language_...
https://webstore.iec.ch/publication/25676
The layman confusion the USB-PD and USB-3.2 specifications is no different than someone thinking they can get 10gbe over a 1000m cat-5 cable because the ends plug into their 10Gbe adapter.
But the author's complaint is still legitimate: in the context of billions of consumer devices, the diversity of behaviors is a problem. With RJ45, as long as the cable wasn't defective, it generally wouldn't fail completely. And relatively few consumers ever wired their own networks, whereas virtually everyone has to deal with USB-C-equipped devices.
That's just not true, and I don't mean this to be demeaning but you clearly haven't had to install new hardware into an old datacenter. I can't tell you how many times I've run into situations where a 1Gbe port would auto-negotiate to 10Mbps half-duplex. Did it technically not fail? I guess... but the line was so lossy you couldn't get a ping to complete much less an actual session of any sort.
At this point I feel like an absolute idiot, since now I've wasted 1/2 hour plus 2-4 Google searches just to charge a laptop. None of the equipment is a sketchy aliexpress/Amazon no name part, except possibly 1 of the cables. If it's this hard for someone with electronics experience who is into tech, I can't even imagine explaining it to a family member in a way that would make sense.
Choosing (1) would have meant that everything would work as you expect, but then even the cheapest devices would have to come with an unnecessarily beefy (and therefore expensive) chargers.
Choosing (2) results in potential for the situation that you described. Lesser chargers and cables cannot charge more demanding devices.
I'm pretty sure (1) would simply have not been practical. It would have been wasteful and the expense would kill adoption. So they went with (2).
Seems reasonable to me.
Thats what everyone is complaining about, that there is no way to know without trial and error what combination of capabilities across (at a minimum) three different elements you're dealing with.
Make it so that we can tell the difference! As per teh articel, they tried to do this with the thunderbolt standard on top of USB-C with a lighting bolt symbol, but even that doesn't mean you know what you're getting in practice.
USB3 for instance mandated blue plastic for connectors, so you could tell the difference from previous generations.
Also, a lot of official chargers are cheap, bulky and slow. Third party does not and has never implied "cheap knockoff". In this case, they aren't knock-offs at all.
Op is complaining about a charger bricking something - the solution is: buy the approved charger from the vendor. They've tested it, they're telling you it won't brick your device, and I'm confident if it does, they'll replace the device. If you DON'T WANT TO, buy third party. But then don't whine or blame USB-C because you DID buy a cheap charger that bricked your device. That has literally nothing to do with USB-C and everything to do with being penny wise and pound foolish.
He's blaming USB-C for something that has nothing to do with USB-C.