Lightning is anything but stupid. It’s small, has no breakable bits in the phone side of the port, and is pretty ubiquitous. I don’t have to worry about whether this cable and charger support the Lightning 2-a (IIV) Gold standard ala USB-C.

USB-C just felt terrible to me when I had a Nexus 5x. Port wasn’t as secure, cable was huge. Not a fan.

Some people wreck the 1st-party cables abnormally quickly; they should buy one of those armored cables from Amazon.