But when designing a standard, if you ignore the needs of implementers you can accidentally write yourself into a place where it becomes impossible for new implementers to completely implement the spec, so we're locked to our existing implementations.
I don't think that HTML has this problem so much, but it's absolutely an issue with both CSS and JavaScript.
It's probably right in this context, but I'd be careful with the last part in general contexts: assuming utility is linear makes for easy reasoning but also would say that a mild stomach ache for every single human (i.e. 7*10⁹ stomach aches) is worth more than the life of someone.