(you’re writing to other users here, for developers you need to make your case on gitlab).
it’s at least twofold: historically no builtin “appstore” facility and then for easier development cross-relations from system repos to apps (permissions), some app to app relations (murenaio onboarding).
For A16 there was another effort to give the user more agency over default apps at least for notifications. This + real launcher hiding could appease some users?