My guess is that the hardware engineer that originally designed the board picked a reasonable part for a traditional auto OEM. Then at some point software engineering decided to log all the things. Nobody actually looked back at what the storage system longevity would be with this new lifecycle.
It's a dumb mistake, but not exactly an uncommon one. I made the same mistake early on and I have contract engineers that propose inappropriate storage solutions to me still on projects. Some very insistently. I think a whole lot of people that work on the embedded side of engineering treat storage as a magic perfect box.