What’s so complex about USB-C that we couldn’t have had this technology 20 years ago?
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Ignoring the extra data speed of USB-C that allows things like displays and graphics cards to be plugged in (obviously just general improvement to chip speeds allowed this), we didn’t get a reversible connector 20 years ago because it would have slightly increased cost and they were going for the absolute minimum possible cost for connectors and cables so that manufacturers of budget PCs and budget consumer devices (who are very sensitive to manufacturing cost) would adopt it (which is actually a hard thing to do for some completely new standard, see that XKCD comic on standards).
Also at the time the idea of a portable storage drives didn’t really exist, for portable storage you would have some kind of drive (eg. a Zip drive) that would be permanently plugged in to your computer and came with removable cartridges that you would take with you. So there wasn’t the need to constantly plug and unplug USB devices like there is now.
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