Bah, the big innovation is the reversible connector. Not sure why that took so long.

Exactly. The old USB connector is just horrible... not only is it non-reversible, but it doesn’t “feel” good. I swear my average number of attempts to plug one in is >2, because even if you get the right orientation, if the alignment isn’t perfect it feels like it’s wrong.

The Type-C connector isn't perfect either, if it is only slightly misaligned my screen goes black, sometimes a small bump to the connector is enough. Good thing I don't have external drives connected to it (yet).

Shrinking these connectors has gone too far.

If you look back through old stack overflow questions about the reversibility you’ll find people saying it can’t be done any other way, giving all sorts of demonstrably false arguments about it being impossible to arrange wires like that!

I never understood why something like 4-pole 2.5mm phono wasn't used for USB. Then you'd have no orientation issues at all, and fumble-insertion would be trivial.

An argument I've heard against this is that a rotating connector wouldn't be electrically stable enough. But this is easily addressed - you could easily add a toothed collar to the plug preventing it from rotating, at the small cost of there being a finite number of dozens of possible orientations, instead a continuous infinity. Or better, just design the protocol to be tolerant to packet loss.

Audio jack has this problem that it shorts contacts during insertion/removal. It wouldn't be compliant with EMI too.

Even if they didn't want to make it reversible they could have made it...something like a rectangle. VGA cables are easy to see the orientation of since they are trapezoidal.

I haven't seen these arguments, but not passively reversible perhaps? (Isn't there logic in the cable or something like that?)

Just picture a USB-A connector. You know the metal plates on the tongue? Put metal plates on the underside as well. Connect each plate on one side, to the plate on the other side, but at the reverse end of the tongue. There you go - passive reversible.

Passive reversible USB-A is actually rather common, as a quick search will show; I first noticed this on USB drives (double-sided tongue), but cables are available with those connectors too. The reversible females look quite a bit more fragile than the males; the latter is simply a double-sided tongue, while the former has the contact block thinned to a double-contacted septum.

Reversible micro-B is also a thing, I recently bought such cable.

I read in an interview with the original USB instigator that he wanted reversible cables but in order to get a standard organized and agreed to they had to go for a non-reversible cable to cut BOM cost.

That's a revelation? Thunderbolt has had all that for nearly a decade now.