I counted six different charging cables in one drawer this week. Six. For devices that all charge at broadly the same wattage, doing broadly the same job, made within about four years of each other.
USB-C was supposed to fix this. It has, mostly — for anything bought in the last two years. The drawer tells a different story about everything older: a headlamp on a proprietary two-pin connector, a set of earbuds on micro-USB that I keep meaning to replace, and a bike light with a cable I'm fairly sure came with no other device I've ever owned.
None of these are individually unreasonable choices by the manufacturer at the time. Collectively, they add up to a drawer nobody can navigate without labelling every cable, and a bag that has to carry four different connectors for what should be a weekend trip requiring one.
The regulation forcing USB-C as standard is a genuinely good thing, and I'll say that as someone who was sceptical it would actually change anything in practice. It has. My newest three devices all share one cable, one charger, and one adaptor for the car. That's the whole point, and it took an actual law to get manufacturers to agree on something this obvious.
I've turned off notifications for everything except messages and calls, which is a separate complaint entirely, but the silence has been, genuinely, an improvement worth mentioning while I'm already annoyed about drawers.