Flat cables can be conformant and they still have twisted pairs. Cables just have to meet the physical properties set by the standard.

Apple was one of the major contributors to the USB-C standard, including the physical connectors.

The tongue design was used because it makes high speed a lot easier. If your traces are in the center of the connector, you can do a cutout of the PCB and mount a “dumb” connector housing for the socket. You can also have a ground plane right in the middle and use both sides for differential pairs, which is exactly what happened. It also means you don’t have to deal with the pain of high frequency signals leaving the board into the air like other connectors.

But yes, don’t shove screwdrivers into your USB sockets either.

Don’t feel bad about reloading to figure out how you want the story to go. BG3 is one of the best story generators in the genre and a lot of the dialogue options have unclear implications (e.g. just-friends dialogue options with gale accidentally leading to romance is one of the fixes in this patch). The point is for you to be able to build the story you want through your actions while still having consequences for those choices, not to pigeonhole you into making the “right” choices.