If it’s easy to patch this out, I wonder if there will be manufacturers that will choose to do so for their official ROMs. It would be extra value for the brand, imho. A reason to choose, say, Samsung, over a Pixel phone, if Samsung were to patch this restriction out, for example. After all, they also have the Galaxy Store which is also offering apps that I doubt they’ll want Google to regulate.

Technically, even an optical port can deliver power. Light is just a particular form of electromagnetic wave that just happens to use another method of transmission (and you might need a different mechanism to transform its energy), but it also has an intensity, potential energy and resistance in the medium of propagation.

It might have been horse-drawn in the 1890s with color paint, and years later photographed with a modern camera.