USB-C is an inferior physical design with a male tongue in the middle of the port. Male portions of a connector will always be more prone to breaking than female connectors. Lightning has it right with the fragile portion in the cable rather than in the connector. Over the years, I’ve had at least 10 USB-C ports go bad because the cable won’t stay in the connector anymore. I’ve never had a Lightning port go bad, though I’ve had to replace several Lightning cables. After paying $900 for motherboard replacements due to bad USB-C connectors, I’ve severely soured on this very poorly designed connector. I’d much rather pay for a new Lightning cable than a new USB-C port.
On top of that, on my 1-year old iPad Pro 12.9” 2021, the port is already starting to loosen with the USB-C cable starting to dangle lower and lower. I don’t do anything with that port except charge. Feature-wise, USB-C has it all over Lightning, but physically, Lightning is superior.
I wish they’d come up with a new connector with the reliability of a Lightning connector and the feature set of USB-C/Thunderbolt.