I have been thinking about this weirdness a lot. In my book communicating via electric currents while seeming weird, isn't because of it's pure practicality. Digitizing these currents instead of transmiting an analog signal seems weird, but isn't because it allows faster, errorfree and more diverse communications etc.

You can go on and follow the technical developement, but you will inevitably reach a point where people stopped understanding the whole stack below them and instead started to cobble together new abstractions from the things they did – until the next generation came and abstracted that. We all know this – it is far easier to add onto something existing, than removing or changing existing things that are just not good enough for the things we want.

So at a certain point you stop doing the rational and efficient thing to solve a problem, but react to more or less organically grown structures and go a extra mile to solve problems you might have never had if you included these capabilities in the existing layers below. But the existing layers below were written ages ago in languages you hate by obscure circles talking on mailing lists, so we don't even bother. The resulting Rube-Goldberg-Machine is weird in that sense: nobody rational who understands all the layers would plan it like it is from the ground up if they had the choice.