this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Most people weren't adding and removing peripherals (and potentially multiple things using the same kind of connector) from their computers multiple times a day when many of your examples were in common consumer usage.
Now we plug and unplug peripherals all the time, and for a great many people those multiple plug/unplug cycles are all using USB, and have been long enough to have plenty of frustration about this.
I don't think Type-A or its creator should burn in the depths of hell, but it's a legitimate complaint for a usage case that most people didn't experience prior to loosely about the time that USB started to rise in popularity, or so my recollection of the chain of events tells me.
Depends, back in the home computer days swapping around joysticks and mouse (and less often lightpens and paddles) was a pretty common occurrence. And over in the console world we had multiple gamepads, multitabs, GameBoy Link cables and the like that also saw a ton of plug-in action.
PC was somewhat special, since joysticks, keyboard, mouse and printers all used different ports, often only accessible on the hard to reach backside of the PC case and sometimes even screwed in. Hotplugging was also not officially supported. Those are however all the issues that USB was specifically designed to fix, so more plug-in action was to be expected.
That said, it is quite true that reversibility really wasn't a concern back than at all. None of the other ports had it, and USB was a huge improvement over previous PC port designs.