Well i dunno, it worked tremendously well for USB 2, don’t you think? Might be my age, but I distinctly remember having heaps of different charging cables. Gone, thanks to EU legislation.
You're not completely honest here, though. It was either Type A jack for power supplies without a cable, or Type B micro jack for fixed cables, and the latter very much specifies the port on the device.
Sort of. Standardizing on a USB-A charger did slightly push people to use a USB form plug on the other end - but data transfer is what really killed the proprietary connectors.
The multitude of USB connectors has been pared down - mini USB was withdrawn due to its design flaws, micro USB was obnoxious for 5Gbps data transfer, as was the larger USB-B plug. The convenience and capabilities of USB-C have slowly replaced them both on the device side, as well as the capability to go higher than 5 Gbps.
If anything has slowed adoption of USB-C, I'd point at desktop PCs and the reluctance to put 'real' USB-C ports on them. This is mostly because of what I consider to be a design error on the USB-IF's part - they added backward compatibility, allowing a USB-C dongle to supply a USB-A connector, when they should have supplied forward compatibility instead. This left a lot of bundled cables as well as hardware dongles like wireless mouse adapters stuck on USB-A.
The decision passed today also talks about harmonizing wireless charging in the future, to make sure it's compatible across brands and device types. Presumably that would happen once the technology has matured a bit more.
Move to wireless only is shame since charge is slow, not good for battery health, breaks many compatibility like wired only CarPlay, and not fixing big file (high quality 4K video) transferring issue.
Why would it be different this time?