Phones or laptops should probably accomodate wired charging (though count on Apple to eliminate it anyway), but most of the time, wireless could be the norm. Convenient, avoids wear on connectors, etc. I think there are some Samsung phones with two-way wireless charging, so you can stack one phone on top of the other and transfer charge. That seemed crazy to me given the non-removable batteries but whatever.

That reminds me of another USB PD idiocy that I forgot to mention earlier. There are many devices like power banks and even some phones, that can both send and receive charging current. E.g. you’d charge your power bank from a wall cube, and later use the power bank to charge your phone. In the pre-USB-C era, power banks had separate connectors for input and output. Now the two functions share a single connector and the cable is the same at both ends.

So if you plug one power bank into another, how does the setup know which one is to be the “charger” and which the “chargee”? The spec says they are suppsed to choose at random! I guess you are supposed to look at the activity lights and if the current is going the wrong way, unplug and replug the devices until it goes the way you want. This can lead to a situation where you plug your phone into a power bank, but the phone ends up charging the power bank instead of the other way around.

I imagine that if you are attentive enough, you can prevent this somehow, or at least intervene and reverse it when it happens. But it still seems like crackhead engineering to me.