I think standards in general are confusing to the average person. The average person doesn't care about standards, they care about completing a task: can I use this cable to connect my Mac to a 4k Monitor? Can it pass all the power that my device needs from my charger? Will this cable be a bottleneck if I connect it to my external SSD storage?

None of my computers support USB4 today, but I'm buying USB4 cables so I don't have to waste so much time looking for a cable that will do a particular job.

I want to say that I will only buy cables that are labeled clearly with capabilities and bandwidth but I'm not sure that is a promise I can keep.