read the reviews? if a cable doesn't work, it'll get flagged pretty damn quickly. i've bought plenty of dirt cheap USB-C cables off amazon and they've all worked fine.
you might get a charge-only cable bundled with some sketchy usb-c accessory. if you do, throw it out. but any standalone cable sold as a cable will do data transfer. the USB-C cables that only carry power and not data is an imaginary problem.
Didn't mean to give the impression that I'm worried about USB-C cables that are power only, that is indeed an imaginary problem.
It's moreso things like PD, is it 480Mbits or is it 5Gbit or is it 10 or 20 or 40. What's the voltages, does it support PD 2.0 oh wait is it 3.0 or 3.1?
To be fair, it's been a number of years since I've tried to purchase cables, so perhaps just grabbing the Anker result at the top will net you most of these features. I just remember having to dig and not getting clear answers one way or another which is the spirit of my question.
i don't have any devices that require 40Gbit, so i can't speak to that. but in my experience, buying the cheapest cable off amazon will reliably give me 20gbit, and will charge all my devices at full speed (i don't know if it's PD2 or 3.0 or 3.1, but i do know that devices pull more power from my 100W charger than my 60W charger)
in practice, in my daily life, all USB C cables work the same. a couple years ago i got one bundled with a device that didn't support some feature, and so i put it in the garbage. problem solved. since then, all my cables work all the time in whatever device i plug them into.
you might get a charge-only cable bundled with some sketchy usb-c accessory. if you do, throw it out. but any standalone cable sold as a cable will do data transfer. the USB-C cables that only carry power and not data is an imaginary problem.