Apple

I think maybe you're still missing the field for the trees. USB C oddly as it's named has for almost all of it's life been a connector standard, of which open connector standards (that arguably weren't as good) existed back then in the form of micro and mini usb which for charging would be more than adequate vs rolling your own connector. I think the thing apple pursued here by rolling there own wasn't even the royalties on it, but direct control of the 3rd party peripheral market (music docks, etc, etc). They've always made safe choices to ensure their market dominance through secondary market forces vs primary ones. Fwiw I'd have had no criticism for Apple regarding lightning if they opened the standard and shared it.

Now. As far as RCS goes. That's just the fault of the people. It takes legitimately 5 minutes at most to download and sign up for signal, or another secure message provider, and the average user has chosen to completely ignore this and use whatever standard their carrier sold them with the phone. Yes carriers, Google, and everyone else should shoulder a ton of blame for settling on such a paltry default, but it's as easy and seamless as it can possibly be to switch off that default and rather than migrate to another (like most other countries) the US population has decided to firmly stick their heads in the sand and use only the default, going as far to forgo "difficult and complex mfa security keys" (not even that difficult. Just scan a qr code and cloud sync for your mfa app) in favor of expensive, insecure, and quite frankly stupid mfa through sms. Its just not a tech issue at this point, but a user issue because people get too attached to defaults or too insistent on not changing. Just look at internet Explorer. Msft had it at end of life status for nearly a decade and people still insisted upon using it, right up until they ripped it from the os, and having worked in the industry I can assure you the users with the firmest grip on IE didn't want it for compatibility reasons. They wanted it because the disliked change.