I need to point out a subtlety that is might or might not be intended in that comic: it's bystanders, or consumers of the 14 standards, trying to fix it.

Unicode was invented by Xerox and Apple employees. USB-C was developed "by Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum."

To be clear, it's not about the huge companies, it's about the people doing the heavy implementation work. They can change 14 standards into 1. And in most cases - with rare exceptions - only they can do that.