Late notes as this is the first hit on “SQL JOIN USING” in my bubble:
#1 There are also NATURAL JOINs, where you don’t even have to specify the columns to join on. It’ll just join on the columns with common names. But that requires that you not only use the same names in your data model for columns that you want to join on, but also different ones for columns that you don’t accidentally want to join on – eg. by generally using a table specific prefix (just like “user_id” from the example above). So even more convinient than USING – but at a much larger price.
#2 USING works at least with PostgreSQL, Oracle and (MariaDB|MySQL)