And then they went too far and introduced laptops that only used USB-C before finally setting at a (so far) happy medium.

I think we needed Apple to do that to throw a lot of weight behind the standard so it didn't get stuck in an eternal migration that never ends. Though removing the SD card slot was dumb since USB-C was never an alternative to SD cards.

Even today the desktop PC market is still stuck on USB-A since they have no Apple equivalent to just get things done.