FOIL is the worst offender in my experience tutoring people in math. I recall several instances of people being completely stumped when trying to multiply a trinomial and a binomial, because they couldn't figure out how to apply FOIL.
Like Fanana: First times all of them, next times all of them, next times all of them... it's not 100% clear but it took 10 seconds to come up with and it works with trinomials and beyond.
Or FettuchENE: First times each of them, plus next times each of them.... Ok, that's kind of bad, but you get the point. FOIL sticks around not becuase it's the best but because it's the most memorable, it's a meme. We should introduce better memes to compete with it.
At the same time, understanding distribution is so much more powerful because it generalizes to many other uses and later concepts.
I think FOIL sticks around primarily because it is what people are taught. Even when people actually do understand distribution, they may not realize that FOIL is just a special case of distributing.
I agree with you that FOILing is stupid and might make the student worse off in the long run, but I think depriving them of getting practive with heuristics might be worse. Ideally a student would notice that FOIL isn't a good trick and stop using it, but there are other "tricks" that are extremely useful.