This happened because the EU forced them to agree on a single charger/cable standard and it happened to be micro-usb for a while. Before this every mobile manufacturer had their own version of a charging AND data cable, separately..
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
Lightning is a more durable design (in terms of plug/unplug cycles), had higher power capacity originally, and was reversible.
Hope you don't do anything involving tiny particles like sand or wood or cloth (like is found inside of pocket in the form of lint)!
The port can't directly drive all the weird miscellaneous pins that USB-C has, but it does have four high speed lanes, the same as USB-C. On a physical level it can reach the same speeds.
Before that, everyone had their own variant of the barrel plug. A few crappy low price vendors just used micro usb instead, since they couldn't possibly have a proprietary moat to speak of anyway.
It's one of the examples where consumer legislation worked.
You will note everyone except Apple did what the EU wanted early in this process.