Surely there are better ways than mandating a very specific technology.
It would be like building codes mandating the use of a very specific concrete mix instead of mandating that supporting members must be able to handle total expected load with a safety factor of 5 or something - I’m not a civil engineer.
This is a very popular industry standard with a well known path for updates – it seems pretty reasonable for the government to simply tell the stragglers to adopt it. Unlike the concrete in your example compatibility is a bigger concern - imagine if you needed special shoes to walk on AppleCrete - and the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern.
It's definitely not terrible — microUSB was so fragile that people replaced cables a lot more frequently. My point was simply that if you're talking about concrete, the waste is on a completely different timescale — Lightning cables are pretty durable but even a decade is ages in tech while buildings and sidewalks are expected to last an order of magnitude longer without outside damage.
It would be like building codes mandating the use of a very specific concrete mix instead of mandating that supporting members must be able to handle total expected load with a safety factor of 5 or something - I’m not a civil engineer.