And no, such cables would still work in plenty of cases. You usually get them by having them bundled with devices they do work well with. In fact, they always work fine with the kind of devices you mention. These cables aren't as common as USB-C-shaped junk that's missing resistors on the receptacle, but I stumbled upon them anyway and I didn't really try to.
A lot of devices are not actually standards-compliant. Some are close. (This may actually be worse.)
My experience has been that if the source and sink are broken, they are often hilariously badly broken and it is pretty easy to figure out that they are the problem, if not quite exactly what they've done wrong. But if things are flaky and weird and don't really make sense, it's probably the cable. Try a known-really-seriously-actually-standards-compliantly-good cable and many problems go away, even if the source and sink aren't perfect.
(Many sources and sinks aren't standards-compliant because, even though they easily could be, they're trying to work around the other end not being standards-compliant itself, because that's what you've got to do to sell a product. So they're close but not quite there. This is not always ideal.)