This is even worse than I already knew, holy shit.
4-wire USB 2.0 in a USB-C cable should be fucking illegal. Utterly counterintuitive if one stops short of reading specs and merely "keeps up" by having to use this nonsense all day every day. Learning about that alone put to bed some head-scratching confusion I've run into with my own stuff over the years.
The cabling problems in particular...just woof!