What would be the alternative? An entirely new physical connector every time manufacturers feel the desire to make this year's model slightly more capable than last year's? Some form of "physical semver" where "not all new features are possible with all old cables" mandates a new plug shape?

If we were still limited to domain specific connectors (one for storage, one for networking, one for audio, one for video, one for each type of user input) we'd still run into the same (non)issues: unless every revision of, say, displayport came with it's own unique connector, without digging a little deeper (checking some version/capability symbols) you don't know wether a given cable supports the latest feature set or not. The universal in USB is not the problem.