If I compare it to USB-based connectors where USB-C never came along.

NACS is like a Lightning plug. From a practical/pragmatic perspective, it was clearly the best plug at the time it was created. It solved real user problems.

CCS a micro-USB 3.0 plug. Maybe you've never seen one[0], but they are a real thing. Let's take an awful plug (micro USB / J1772) and clumsily add a few more wires on to it to make it both more capable and even worse. It does what you need it to do, but nobody has ever thought it was good at it.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Connecto...