Is it really worse now than it was before?

Having a plug on say a laptop that can be a charger, a HID, a drive, a monitor, or all of the above with a docking station is vastly superior to the old day IMHO.

Unfortunately the cable to do that isn't cheap and is massively overkill for say a phone charger. Thus cable compatibility becomes a thing but looking at HDMI cable compatibility is always a thing.

I think the problem is what used to be complaints about niche connectors are complaints about USB-C and it feels different and more impactful even if it isn't necessarily.

After all I know back in the Mini-USB days you had manufacturers skipping the data pins to save some copper leading to frustration when you couldn't transfer files.