There were many competing standards and it took quite a while for the market to converge on usb-c and only then when it was already the most popular connector by far did EU determine it was the “best” standard.
Firewire, Thunderbolt 1, all kinds of different usb type ports where designed by various groups of companies it was not self evident that they will fail in the market at that point.
No industry group let alone an EU committee can know what will fail or succeed in advance its just an absurd assumption that it could ever be otherwise.
So there seems to be some confusion over premises in this thread.
The people pointing out the USB-C law as a failure are reasoning from the Golden Rule: what would happen if everyone did this? Nobody would design new connectors because of the catch-22 the law creates. You can't know what the next new connector should be without a competitive market, but governments have ended such a market. Also, to invest in a new technology requires a belief that you can actually launch it and gain profit by outcompeting other technologies, but government mandated monopolies prevent that, so there's just no incentive to do the work anymore.
The people arguing the USB-C law is fine are reasoning from a different and totally local perspective: why shouldn't we implement a command economy in Europe when we'll get the benefits of a free market economy by importing US goods anyway? They assume new tech will be developed for the US market and then all the EU has to do is have a committee that approves it.
The problem with this idea, beyond it being just pathetic, is there's no reason the US has to sell to Europe and the more annoying the EU makes trade the fewer technologies will be available for import. It's already common that new US tech products either don't launch in Europe or launch much later. Now frontier models are being restricted and not made available to European companies, that will make them fall even further behind. And we can assume that when a new connector is designed that's better than USB-C products designed around it will launch everywhere except Europe for a while, as only some products will have enough sales to justify an EU specific variant. So Europeans will eventually get used to not being able to acquire many products at home because import is blocked by the EU.
They were relying on the West for high-tech tractors and even to build factories (I know Ford helped them build some factories for a part of the factory output). I also know they used to look at the allocation of goods in the US as a starting point to decide what to produce, as they were basically running blind to what people needed or wanted.