Perhaps it reduces interference in the same cable if the USB Vbus is noisy? It might also be just to suppress radiation from the cable which could affect other

Perhaps it reduces interference in the same cable if the USB Vbus is noisy? It might also be just to suppress radiation from the cable which could affect other devices. Though I'm not sure you really need it on USB2. I've built custom totally unshielded USB2 cables that have been put on drones. The important thing is that the differential pair is twisted, otherwise it doesn't work at all. We never had any issue with EMI from the motors, which can be quite bad on quadcopters. This obviously isn't something that might pass CE testing, but my point is differential cabling is fairly noise tolerant. I'm fairly sure you could run USB2 through a coat hanger and it'd be OK. Most USB application notes also specify a small ferrite bead, so there is normally something on the PCB for filtering as well. Wurth have a nice app note on this (search for ANP024). USB3 though, is particularly bad for radiating with low quality cables. My logitech mouse dongle will drop if I connect a high bandwidth camera over a poorly shielded cable.