It occurs to me that this concept is probably a new idea to most people -- in the past, such ports mostly had a fixed electrical protocol per connector type (with allowances for some differences in USB1/2/3, or Ethernet 10/100/1000).

Microcontroller chips have long had this kind of thing -- an "Arduino" chip (ATMEGA328p) has a relatively small number of pins for communicating with the world, and most of those pins can be programmed with any of a number of radically different electrical interfaces, be it digital-in, digital-out, Analog-in, PWM-out, I2C, SPI, etc.. all on one pin.

Same basic thing, but at much much higher clock speeds!