They should just force every connector and cable to have a label on it that says the speed and power. Then, you'll always know for sure.
Each of those except the default would have a color. Most cables wouldn't have any color, most of rest would have one color, and at most two colors. Many of the combinations aren't used, like 5A is almost always used with USB2 charging cable.
USB 3 speeds: 5, 10, 20 Gb/s
USB 4 speeds: 40, 80 Gb/s
But for power, it's all over the place. Every single cable and connector seems to have its own idea of what they want to do.
It could be anywhere from:
* 5V@100mA=0.5W (low power, with no power delivery standard)
* 48V@5A=240W
With a good dozen options in-between those two.
The only unambiguous way is to just label them. One for speed in Gb/s, one for power in watts. Easy.
They're trying - https://www.kensington.com/news/docking-connectivity-blog/us... and https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20210930005098/en/911442/....
It's nice that there are so many standards to chose from though. https://xkcd.com/927/
Does a 'red' stripe mean my 'green' device will or will not work? Or, confusing things further, work fine but maybe not be able to pull enough power to (fast) charge or have degraded capabilities like full speed data but no display.
IMO this is something that should be handled by the host / software and a clear nomenclature for capabilities. Notify the user if there are missing, required capabilities or performance is degraded and that they need to upgrade the cable to achieve X. As long as the cable meets the minimum USB spec this should be achievable fairly easily.
Where a marking is absolutely needed though is 'charging only' cables with no data lines. These are infuriating.