Leaving off parts should result in behavior which is identical whether you connect an A-C cable or a C-C cable. Detecting the difference between them should require adding parts.
It's like saying USB cables should still carry 10Gbps data when only the VBUS and GND wires are present, because some AliExpress scammers leave out the data wires: you can't leave out trivial core parts and still expect it to work!
I know. You need the detection for the fancy stuff like PD, not for basic operation.
So why does it matter that a resistor is missing on the sink side? It's stupid.
I suppose that instead of a $0.01 resistor to request power they could have mandated some kind of (probably more expensive) circuit breaker that detects the short and shuts things off before it causes a fire, but I suspect then instead of broken devices having missing resistors you'd get ones with missing circuit breakers...
It pretty hard (maybe impossible) to design a spec that still works when manufacturers randomly omit critical components for no reason.