[bunderbunder]

> Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?

Office politics. Google is famously "performance-driven", so the manager in charge of that feature needs usage metrics to be high for the sake of their own career.

(Speculating, of course.)

[FinnLobsien]

That's a funny idea—if the KPI was boosting adoption of a feature and the PM just made that feature the default and suddenly adoption was through the roof.

The sad part is we can't rule that out.