I personally find it rather infuriating that swapping those is made so difficult, and to this day don't know who has more usecase for media keys and varied power buttons over function keys.

Non-IT people, who, believe it or not, are the majority of users out there. I've stopped keeping score several years ago on how many people had asked me how to bind F-keys to something else, but at that point things were like 100% of IT people wanted F-keys, while 70-80% of non-IT asked me for help rebinding them to other things.

I'm a programmer and these decisions annoy me as well, I'm just pointing to the answer as for why some computers come with the annoyance enabled (and often make it unnecessarily hard to change it). I'm by no means defending it. If anything, I think it should be up to the OS to have an easy way to change the behavior instead of assuming what the user needs and making it difficult to change.