alt Hacker NewsThat is, Nintendo intentionally used a widely-used, well-specified standardised connector and protocol, and chose to make their implementation subtly non-compliant in several ways. And there is no discernible good reason to do so (as far as I know it’s not like they actually needed to do anything special, stock-standard, compliant USB-C would work perfectly fine).
Exactly. It would be understandable if they took the connector and implemented something custom entirely. But they spent engineering effort on altering the official, already working spec, to subtly break it. This was completely intentional.