Such A-to-A adaptors and cables always have been prohibited by the USB spec, but people built them anyway. A common usecase for “illegal” A-A cables i remember was connecting PCIe cards (especially GPUs and mining cards) externally to riser sockets.

The Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd. literally generates most of its income via companies using Raspberries in production. The dual HDMI ports on the RPi 4 are another acknowledgedment of that (the ability to drive two monitors at once was added in recognition of digital signage customers).