Grouping is also key to de-duplicating IMO. Can be tough to throw away a single cable. But when you have 10 of them grouped together, you know you can safely get rid of them.

IM/FWIW: I personally have found 4mil ziploc-style bags to be pretty close to indestructible. They're like thick evidence locker bags

When you do that, just throw away the ones that only have power. If they're skimping that badly on the data wires, the power wires probably suck too. And it's not giving them a meaningful improvement in flexibility/weight.

Yes. In a different version of the future, the bboc is replaced by next day amazon a universal adapter.

A few years ago I had to use a pair of high-voltage to low-voltage differential SCSI converters to connect an external DEC TK50 tape drive to my PC, because while I had plenty of HD68-to-HD68 cables, and HD68-to-Centronics cables, and a wide variety of ISA and PCI SCSI HBAs (and probably a couple EISA and Micro Channel boards if I looked hard enough, and I seem to recall finding a VL bus SCSI HBA on a shelf at work a few years ago), the only PCIe SCSI HBAs I have are multichannel cards with VHDCI ports, and the only VHDCI cables I have are VHDCI-to-VHDCI and VHDCI-to-HD68.

That's pretty much exactly my organization, instead of a big box I split them into smaller tubs. USB is further divided via labeled bags into USB A->C, USB C, Lightning, and "misc". On top of those I have a R/C car battery/charging tub and a home automation tub.

There are some 3d printer models for building grids of individual cable organizers (https://makerworld.com/en/models/946444-gridfinity-cable-org...) but I have too many cables and my collection is too dynamic to well-utilize something as static as that.

Large 4mil ziploc style bags are extremely durable and are about $0.26 each in bulk on Amazon.

I very much recommend them. As a bonus, you can label them if desired. (Print a label out, or slap some tape on there and write on that, or just stick a sheet of paper inside the bag and write on that)