Because of the purported interoperability explicitly implied by the U in USB, and what people have come to expect that stands for, AND the fact that the specs spell out charging protocols, voltage restrictions/limiting, etc, backwards and upside down. It's a bit like a sort of "good" inverse of DRM: that specific charger's failure doesn't fall into a grey area, it squarely calls it out as bad, because "you get a certification" is gated on a manufacturer's word that they've implemented the spec, and correctly. (DRM, by comparison, implements a "thou shall not pass" that is sufficiently complex that passage incontrovertibly equates to breakage. Here, the "thou shall pass" is tied to some complexity that the manufacturer clearly promised they implemented, but didn't.)
I expect the GP could reasonably report where they got the charger to the USB-IF, and theoretically cause the manufacturer in question to receive a bit of heat for what occurred. Practically speaking the state of things suggests that the USB-IF is probably dealing with enough of a firehose of such reports it probably takes sufficiently long for action to be taken that manufacturers practically get away with this sort of thing :'(
Obviously if the charger was purchased from somewhere like Amazon it'd probably never get taken down without reasonable expense (purchasing additional units to prove danger) and media fanfare. Hahah.
How is "purported interoperability" important here though? There were big news warning of highly proprietary cheap Apple chargers frying MacBooks as well. You're trying to blame USB-C for a problem that's completely orthogonal to it.
Connectors are the same, so what? A cheap and poor micro usb, or apple magsafe, or household 110v or whatever cable, can fry your stuff. Regardless of connector or standard or shape or size you can buy a quality product or a crap product. Usb c is not a sign of quality. It's a standard. I think to siblings point, you can buy an apple fake charger that can fry your Macbook. That's not apples fault or standard fault or universal design fault. That's a crappy no name cheap part fault.
Don't get me wrong. I used to buy 50cent Dollarama cables too. Then I followed some of the links fellow hacker news folks posted and now I don't - whether usb c or whatever else. Seeing an oscilloscope or whatever graph of quality vs shoddy charger is illuminating and terrifying.
I expect the GP could reasonably report where they got the charger to the USB-IF, and theoretically cause the manufacturer in question to receive a bit of heat for what occurred. Practically speaking the state of things suggests that the USB-IF is probably dealing with enough of a firehose of such reports it probably takes sufficiently long for action to be taken that manufacturers practically get away with this sort of thing :'(
Obviously if the charger was purchased from somewhere like Amazon it'd probably never get taken down without reasonable expense (purchasing additional units to prove danger) and media fanfare. Hahah.