I have three of these I've collected over the last 3 years, and none of them work anymore.
Is this the new USB-C future we were promised? With a single-point of failure for everything as the number of ports on laptop decreases year-on-year?
A lot of this stuff is just cheap trash that's designed to fail. Definitely worth spending a bit more on these things. You're absolutely right about the lack of standardisation, though. That's an absolute disgrace.