No, it really doesn't work well. Have you ever used a USB protocol analyzer or written a USB device driver?
Bad cables operating out of spec don't just make things a bit slower - they introduce noise. They corrupt data which best case is caught by a checksum and just creates latency but worst case triggers device driver bugs and makes devices behave oddly, hang, need to be plugged and unplugged, etc. This is enormously frustrating for users and it happens all the time. Users typically blame their devices, or their computers, rather than the bad cabling.
Furthermore, it's not even remotely correct that an average person doesn't need more than USB2.0 speeds. That's only 480Mbit/s, which isn't nearly enough to drive the $80 HD webcams that we're all using while WFH. Common modern webcams need like 1.5Gbit/s, and that's just the webcam. You can't run a typical WFH computer on USB 2.0 in the age of zoom meetings.
If you're not a 45k+ a year type, you might very well be doing remote work on phones, assuming you're WFH at all. Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high.
Even if you are, webcams could very well run in 480Mbps if they had to, if in camera encoding was still the norm, which it would be if high speed cables weren't (theoretically) widespread.
I agree that the situation might not be ideal for people doing stuff beyond average consumer level, but even that could be mostly worked around with a controller firmware update(Count the bit error rate, inform the user if they are using a trash cable).
No amount of standardization and marking of the cables will eliminate scammers without killing cheap uncertified stuff totally, so I would think software and documentation fixes would be best.
Most stuff already comes with a suitable USB cable. Just pop up a reminder to fish out the good one if the one you're using is bad.
"Almost all laptops have built-in cameras and the convenience factor is pretty high."
How do you think the internal camera on most laptops is connected to the rest of the computer? (Hint: It's permanently wired to the USB bus. It's a non-removable USB webcam)
Given this fact, it seems you should actually agree with my original statement.
However, many newer laptops have begun to use cameras with a MIPI interface, like the smartphones. This has created problems with bad device driver support for non-Windows operating systems, as discussed in a recent HN thread.
Bad cables operating out of spec don't just make things a bit slower - they introduce noise. They corrupt data which best case is caught by a checksum and just creates latency but worst case triggers device driver bugs and makes devices behave oddly, hang, need to be plugged and unplugged, etc. This is enormously frustrating for users and it happens all the time. Users typically blame their devices, or their computers, rather than the bad cabling.
Furthermore, it's not even remotely correct that an average person doesn't need more than USB2.0 speeds. That's only 480Mbit/s, which isn't nearly enough to drive the $80 HD webcams that we're all using while WFH. Common modern webcams need like 1.5Gbit/s, and that's just the webcam. You can't run a typical WFH computer on USB 2.0 in the age of zoom meetings.
USB is an absolute nightmare right now.