Worse: at least thunderbolt provided USB downstream ports by including a PCIe-backed USB root controller.
On USB4, all USB 2.0 downstream devices have to share the limited USB 2.0 bandwidth at the upstream port.
They could have just specified a translator like they did for USB 1.1 -> USB 2.0, but they didn't and it's not possible to make one that works reliably/portably.