[rybosworld]

In human play, white has somewhere between 0.25 - 0.5 pawn advantage. There's evidence that at higher ELO's, the advantage declines but it's not clear what the lower bound is.

So for top players (and even more-so for top chess engines), the white advantage isn't enough to translate to a win.

In human play, the top players often need to play suboptimal moves to convert a win. Magnus Carlsen is probably the most famous for doing this. The point is to break away from the well studied lines, and play something that other pros aren't familiar with.

Basically: It's not clear that white's small advantage actually counts for much, at least at the very top tiers of chess.

Changing the game in such a way that white and black odds become even more balanced, would just lead to more draws - which I personally would think makes the game less interesting.