To elaborate: Why must a USB cable look different from an HDMI cable? Why must we have B-type and C-type chargers? Why use circular audio jacks when it can be “USB’ed” instead? and so on
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USB-C is an attempt to do all these things, but it’s fairly new, and there are plenty of older standards still out there. USB-A (the “normal” USB) has been out over twenty years, as has HDMI. Back then, USB was slow & was designed to be cheap, so cable tolerances were not very high. As a result, USB’s signaling technology wasn’t fast enough to transmit digital video. So HDMI was created with cables with different tolerances for video.
USB *did* manage to replace a lot of older standards — parallel printer ports, serial modem ports, keyboard & mouse ports, RS232 joystick ports… but until USB v3 it didn’t have the bandwidth to transmit video. At that point, we had lots of different USB connectors: USB-A, USB-B (the “printer” connector), mini USB (common on digital cameras), micro USB (most cell phones until ~2017), lightning (Apple)… So the USB consortium looked at what was needed now, and came up with USB-C.
USB-C (and Thunderbolt 4, which is a superset of USB-C) could conceivably become almost universal & be used for pretty much all digital consumer signals. Even then, though, there’s variation there, as Thunderbolt 3 & 4 cables are two seemingly-identical-but-different-electrically cables. We’re not out of the woods yet.
Meanwhile the various audio jacks (small and big headphone plugs, RCA, 1/4″ “guitar” cables, etc) are far older, and they carry a different *kind* of signal: analog audio. These are each well established for a certain use, and the fact that they’re different could actually be seen as an advantage, as they keep you from hooking up electrically-incompatible signals (like plugging your headphones into the phono output of your record player).
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