I like the title. It points out the problem with government interference in these markets. Sure, maybe most of us prefer USB-C, but by denying Apple the right to make the product it wants to make and leaving it up to customers and marketplace to decide if they want to buy it, where does it stop? Who gets to choose? Will there still be innovation, or has the EU effectively decreed that USB-C is the last connector by denying competition to see if something else rises to the top?
For most PC's I've built for family members, they're not for gaming and stock coolers have been fine. I wouldn't use a stock cooler on a gaming PC, but if it's just going to do some light browsing, notes in OneNote and some Excel work around tax time? Sure, the stock cooler is plenty.
By banning included CPU accessories, it creates more work and raises system costs for those who don't need a third-party cooler. If it mattered to the market, then there would already be a competitive advantage to leaving that stuff out (and some SKUs did). Or, maybe it reflects that there is more than one customer preference in the marketplace. Shocker: not everyone has to want the same thing. Diversity in options is a good thing.
Not only does having multiple options allow different vendors to satisfy different customers' preferences, like evolution leading to creatures to fill different environmental niches, it also inspires innovation and clever solutions. What starts as niche product only serving a small group of customers may later morph into something broadly appealing. Competition and experimentation drives that.
E.g., most mobile phone users had no interest in smartphones in the early 2000's. A few of us used Palm phones or Windows phones or Blackberries or even Nokia Symbian phones. But then Apple mixed their defining features with the first multi-touch screen and its iPod to create a whole new product category that now nearly everyone uses. If not for Palm's niche device, maybe Apple never would have done that.
Or another example: VHS beat betamax in spite of its better picture quality for VCR tapes back in the day. But, the failure of betamax still highlighted the problems with VHS in the area of video quality, which helped drive subsequent interest in DVDs. If government had stepped in and stomped out betamax in the name of enforcing a standard, it may have been a longer and more expensive transition to DVDs, Netflix, and streaming services.
Governments: stay out of it. You can't help. You can only slow down and break things.
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