That's a pretty narrow reading of that XKCD: even the examples it gives are not the result of attempting to unify a set of standards.
Eg. AC chargers had a bunch of different, diverged "standards" for pretty much restricted use-cases (those 1.5mm x 4mm connectors and then micro- and mini-USB). Text encodings had multiple standards for encoding the same text (eg IBM, Windows code pages and ISO encodings) without unification attempts.
In both of these examples, there is one unifying standard added (USB-C and UTF-8 + Unicode) that did stop the proliferation of new standards.
But majority of things never result in one unifying standard that can do everything win: even SGML brough up in this discussion is an example. CORBA also springs to mind.
Eg. AC chargers had a bunch of different, diverged "standards" for pretty much restricted use-cases (those 1.5mm x 4mm connectors and then micro- and mini-USB). Text encodings had multiple standards for encoding the same text (eg IBM, Windows code pages and ISO encodings) without unification attempts.
In both of these examples, there is one unifying standard added (USB-C and UTF-8 + Unicode) that did stop the proliferation of new standards.
But majority of things never result in one unifying standard that can do everything win: even SGML brough up in this discussion is an example. CORBA also springs to mind.