I’m very well aware of that and I never meant to imply that lightning predates USB 3.0, however, the biggest complaint that people had about lightning is that it’s limited to USB 2.0 speeds. My comment was pointing out that it would have been very strange for Apple to make the lightning port USB 3.0 when the iPhone 5 had such slow storage read/write speeds, and no user accessible filesystem. Most phones at the time used Micro-B at USB 2.0 as well, and a year later, the Note 3 came out with a USB Micro-B with 3.0 speeds, but that was very rare (I’m not aware of any other phone with USB Micro-B with that wide 3.0 connector).

USB 3.0 speeds on phones only became common with the Type-C connector, not prior to it.