Might one use a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 cable as a direct replacement for
an ordinary 10Gb USB-C cable w/o any problems?

Being new to using TB, I surmise higher cost is the only issue.
thxs

---

39°36'17"N 75°44'43"W

DuckDuckGo
The search engine that doesn't track you.

DemComm Records 2021 Greatest Hits
includes:
Taxman by Joe & Nancy's Rich Ice Cream Band
The Humpty Dance by The Harris-Brown Hookup
Lets Spend The Night Together by The Fang-Swalwell Gang
Díaz-Canel Is A Friend of Ours by The AOC Squad
My Old Kentucky Retirement Home by MitchMcC & The Soggy Boxer Boys
Burning Down The House by Merrick & The Goons
Back In the USSR by Bernie's Red Square Trio

Yes.

I use certified Thunderbolt 40GB/100w cables as USB-C data-cables and charge cables every once in awhile when I need a spare.

Just doesn't work the other way around.

---

I seem to have misplaced my good cable, another one's on order. And just in time because in testing an M1 for work - specifically the MDM wipe command (which prior to Monterey would always ERASE the SSD requiring a painfully slow OS reinstall over the network; in Monterey it is supposed to revert the drive to clean OS install state and that seems to work about 50% of the time) - it's somehow gotten bungled to the point where after nicely wiping back to clean OS and working fine for hours, I shut it down and now it only displays a black screen with a grey encircled exclamation mark (!) with the text [support.apple.com]. I'd understand this if I'd issued another wipe command, but as things stand it was a functional OS last night, fully patched to 12.1, and then it was shut down. Now, to be fair, I did run nvram boot-args="-v" ... oh and I was screwing around and set auto-boot to false. I'll bet that did it.

Anyway, absolutely, a good USB-C data cable should be able to transport ethernet - doesn't necessarily need to be thunderbolt does it? It just can't be the power delivery cable Apple provides with the USB-C power supplies. I'm hoping that I can share internet from a host Mac running caching server with connected Macs needing full software restores / internet recoveries connected via USB-C / tbolt to the host Mac to get MUCH faster download speeds since it should almost entirely be coming locally from the host Mac's fast SSD.

Sorry, that's a lot to unpack above. To answer your question, tldr; YES!

---

g=

I think you need to get used to using Configurator 2 along with an Apple USB-C power-cable and another Mac to revive or restore the M1 per these instructions:

[support.apple.com]

---

… Configurator 2…

That’s really cool, thanks for posting it!!

Quote
rich in distress
… Configurator 2…

That’s really cool, thanks for posting it!!

Really cool, but really slow and frustrating, with obscure fail-messages.

Still, it's all we've really got at this point for reviving M1 Macs.

---