Nobody thought that they could push 50A at 12V through half the connector. It's management wanting to push industrial design as opposed to safety. They made a new connector borrowing from an already existing design, pushed up the on paper amperage by 3A, never changed the contact resistance, and made the parent connector push current near it's limit (10.5A max vs 8.3A). And oh, the insertion force is so, so much higher than ever before. Previous PCIe connectors push about 4A through a connector designed for about 13A.

Worth also mentioning that the same time the 12VHPWR connector was being market tested was during Ampere, the same generation where Nvidia doubled down on the industrial design of their 1st party cards.

Also there's zero devices out there that actually deliver or take 240W over USB-C. Texas Instruments literally only released the datasheets for a pivotal supporting IC within the last 6 months.