HDMI was invented for HD TV sets. it works great at its original resolution of 720i or 720p. At higher resolutions, it quickly develops issues that are complex to solve, and the cables and adapters required to solve are NOT intuitive.
HDMI cables you want for HDMI-only Displays (higher resolutions than 720p TV sets) are marked as Certified with an anti-counterfeiting tag and are labeled:
"PREMIUM High Speed HDMI cable" or that + "with Ethernet" (up to 4K at 60Hz) --OR--
“ULTRA High Speed HDMI cable" or that + "48G"
Cables with No Certification tags are good for your standard 720p TV set, and not much more.
An adapter sold as only 4K may not be a high enough performance standard (it could be only for 4K at 30 Hz) to be error free in operation with recent versions of MacOS, if connecting to a TV set that accepts a real 4K signal.