Cable lengths are even worse as a unit, as apparently they can't even agree whether it should be 100, 101 or 120 fathoms. And then one would still have to decide which definition of a fathom to use, and if 1 fathom = 2 feet is used then off of which foot it should be based.
We should just measure everything in basic units. Instead of one nautical mile just make it 1.14661 * 10^38 planck lengths... (which makes me note that a US land mile is reasonably close to 10^38 planck lengths...)
Although Earth isn't precisely a nice round sphere - i.e. one minute of angle of the Equator is not identical to one minute of angle of a meridian. And yes, both variants were used for the definition of a nautical mile at some point (the difference is something like 20 meter per nm, hence not trivial). The 1929 definition simply expressed it based off of a mathematical model of Earth as an ellipsoid - in normal metric units.