tl;dr: Intel made Thunderbolt 3 royalty free in 2018, so now it's essentially being adopted as USB4.

I had to look up what the point of 40Gbps was, and the industry evangelization site https://thunderbolttechnology.net/ explains that it will allow driving one 5k display or two 4k displays, which is not possible with the 20Gbps offered by USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 2.

This also helps external GPUs, where TB2/USB3.2 is the equivalent of 2.5 PCI-e 3.0 lanes, while TB3/USB3 is 5.

With that, it seems the goal is to be a viable alternative to PCI-e and HDMI, rather than just improve on today's USB3 speeds for existing device classes.