You are totally right to be confused, the USB naming is a total mess. A quick Google search told me that your two ports are Thunderbolt4, another thing to mix in. TB4 to my knowledge integrates USB4, so you can basically connect anything that is USB2,3,4 or Thunderbolt3 or 4. Luckily, none if that matters for your use case, pretty much all proper docking stations support charging (usually the functionality is listed explicitly on the docking station description), so you can probably choose almost any. If you go with one of the big laptop manufacturer's product (Dell, HP) it is pretty much guaranteed to work. Personally, I use HP's Thunderbolt 3 dock for my gf and HP's universal Thunderbolt Dock for myself across my work and private devices. Even works on my android phone!
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Thanks a lot! So to be clear, the cable that links my laptop to a dock isn't as important as I'm thinking it may be? Or are you saying I'd be best off investing in a nice thunderbolt 4?
It is only important when you want to connect displays to the dock, if that is not your use case, any travel dock for 40 bucks will do :)
Man I get stingy and always have to go for the nicer products, even if I dont need them lol I've been eyeing thinkpad, dell, anker, and pluggable docks mostly. There's a brand called wavlink too that has great deals but can seem to find much info on them
It's really confusing. USB-C is a physical connector that can carry the USB protocol, as well as power over the USB-PD standard, PCIe over the Thunderbolt protocol, DisplayPort over Alt-mode, and probably more that I'm not thinking of. The versions of USB that you're seeing are just for speed of file transfer, nothing else, except USB4 which adds support for USB-PD, Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, and everything else. The ports on your laptop are all Thunderbolt, which is equivalent to USB4.
If all you want is power, you need the cable to support USB-PD, which every cable that I know of does. Any cable should work. However, if you want to charge at more than 65W (which you probably don't because your laptop is small), you'll need a cable with an "e-marker" chip—just get a cable that is rated for whatever wattage you need.
If you need to transfer lots of data (which it doesn't sound like you do), you'll probably want something like USB3.1 (also known as USB3.2 Gen 2 and USB3 10Gbps) or USB3.2 Gen 2x2 (USB3 20Gbps) cable (yes, their naming scheme is horrible). If not, USB3.0 (also known as USB3.2 Gen 1 and USB3 5Gbps) or even USB2.0 should be fine.
To summarize, almost anything will work for your needs, but anything extra would require you to buy a cable that has explicit support. To make it easier for you, it looks like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T19KQYF has support for everything that you might need and much more: full power delivery up to 100W, more than twice what you need; 20Gbps Thunderbolt data transfer and 10Gbps (USB3.2 Gen 2) USB data transfer, many times more than you need; and displays connected to it, even though you don't need it. I'm not sure if it has full Thunderbolt PCIe support, but that shouldn't matter to you, and the price is pretty good.