A dangling bag of coins is a famous cheap EMC test for products. All of this sounds like monitor vendors cheaped out on their EMC and need to have their ESD and Immunity certifications reevaluated....
Or maybe it's just the fact that they were dumb enough to ship an I²C interface over a cable as part of the industry spec. Never ship I²C off-board or this kind of crap happens.
We don't know who produced these cables nor where they came from. I'd wager it's mostly an issue with cheaper products, and you often don't get any cables if you're buying a cheap monitor, so they're likely from a third party.
Because part of hardware engineering is making devices that function even in poor environments, and that tolerate foreseeable misuse. (This is a major part of medical device development, for example.) Cable shielding is always iffy on consumer-grade cables. If other vendors can produce monitors that tolerate its absence, because that seems to be reasonably common!, then if you can't, your products will be seen as inferior. Exactly as is happening here.
Also dont trust all electricians. Lots of them just try and error, nod in terror. Some do not even speak the language of the e-plan they are cabling up.
So imagine all the problems you could have, and multiply it by variable frequency cable that thanks to increases in resolution has to run way higher clocks than it used to, combined with being cheapest possible design, and that unlike it's analog origins an error in bitstream can now crash the connection instead of just causing temporarily off-colour area.
Well, I guess this explains some of my "why the fuck is this even an option" when trying to make a TV just display the signal as it was received.
Actually never heard about this before.
What is the trick? It cannot just be to shake a bag of coins next to the monitor?