This is by design. It is a unbelievably high-bandwidth interface. It has strict physical limitations and it is expensive to create products that are capable of

This is by design. It is a unbelievably high-bandwidth interface. It has strict physical limitations and it is expensive to create products that are capable of pushing those limits, thus the 16" passive cable limitation in many affordable devices.This is all kind of annoying but enables creation of devices that were not possible before, and what on earth any of this has to do with USB-C which is an entirely different signal pathway without these particular limitations is anybody's guess. (Mostly what I cannot suffer is the fools who position these limited passive connections on the wrong damn side of the device.)