Putting spring on the connector part rather than socket part means the easily replaceable part has wear item. Lighting is designed wrong here.

And our helpdesk had more broken lightning connectors than anything else in shop that's ~ 50/50 PC/Mac

I’m surprised to hear that it was such a common failure. I used plenty of lighting devices back in their hay day and plenty of USBC devices since they became common. I don’t tend to treat those devices gingerly and have far more issues with USBC than I ever did with Lightning, even accounting for the fact that lots of devices have USBC but only phones and mp3 players had lightning.