No he isn't. He's assuming the wires are plugged into the same physical ports and the USB/Thunderbolt system makes that information available (it does).

No, I’m saying that the same physical ports, on broken hardware, won’t always enumerate to the same physical port. Say port 0 is the one on the left and port 1 is on the right. You’d expect that the computer is able to reliably get that right and be consistent. I’m saying that in the case of broken hardware / bad firmware that it’s not, and port 0 will come up as the right port, with port 1 on the left, with no working, proper way to identify between the two.