I don’t know… that seems excessive, even people I’ve known to handle all of their stuff like it’s free have managed to go mostly through 1-2 cables a year.
Reality is if you go out at all you've probably figured out that phones only come with 1/2 day of real battery life (because they do the damn factory tests with full bars of reception, not real world 1-bar reception), and you needed to charge a phone stuffed in one pocket with a battery in the other pocket, connected by a USB-C cable, and bike, ski, run, hike, climb rocks, whatever it is. Or had to use a laptop in a bus where an asshole plops their heavy ass next to you and you accidentally ram your laptop and USB-C connector into the side wall. Or because pants are designed with only 2 instead of 3 front pockets, one is occupied by wallet and another by a big fat keyring, you have no cohice but to put phone in your back pocket and battery in the other back pocket with a wire between the two and sit on it while plugged in. Or had to stuff your charging phone and battery into a jacket, crumple the whole thing and stuff it into a TSA bin. Or children bite your cables. Or dogs. Or the phone was in the car with a suction cup holder and fell off ramming its USB-C cable into some hard part of the car floor. THIS is daily consumer life.
If one hasn't experienced the above, they probably sit in an office all day and work out in a gym and are oblivious to the realities of active lifestyles and how they are highly incompatible with physically weak connectors like USB-C.
For chewed cables I agree. But again to actually make a resilient cable it would need to be thicker than most modern phones, the connector is not the weak point here.
Also you could easily miniaturize an IEC power cable, it's the material and design that makes it good, not the size. Rubbery plastic and all forces transferred to housing not the PCB.
They should look at Zojirushi water boiler magnetic plugs. You can yank them all you want and they don't deform. They're designed to be yanked off accidentally by children without bringing down a pot of boiling water from the counter. They just need to miniaturize the concept.
