In some ways this is OpenSSL's fault. So the first answer is, your tooling decided to make you answer this question instead of picking its own answer based on the expertise of the authors. A 1990s TV
could have a UI where you need to explicitly configure which pins of a SCART connector have what signals on them, but that would be crazy so the TV just worked with the usual SCART pins as defined and if your pin-out is weird it won't work. The TLS 1.2 standard itself doesn't say "Make the user or administrator pick from this huge list". You can make cipher suite decisions like this in SSH too, but you probably mostly don't because the defaults are fine.
Now, the technical answer as to why there's something to pick from at all goes like this:
TLS is a negotiated protocol. Some HN regulars are convinced negotiation is a bad idea, and indeed they will point to TLS as an example. But the idea is that with a vast population of servers and clients on the Internet it isn't actually practical to hold a flag day (replacing all software on clients and servers immediately) to upgrade TLS. Different clients and servers may have different priorities, so we'd like them to be able to agree each time on something they're both content with. For example on your general purpose laptop there is hardware AES, so AES ciphers are fast and secure, but some cheap devices don't have that, so for them AES is annoyingly slow/ power hungry. As a result they'd prefer ChaCha20 if possible.
How did the list get so long? There's a point around the turn of the century when countries realise oh, this Internet thing is important, and you get a rash of "cryptographic nationalism" where a government that likes to think of itself as important notices the US government made things like DES and it decides it can do that too, resulting in vanity ciphers which are less analysed, less popular, and basically have no reason to exist. TLS 1.2 doesn't explicitly discourage you from supporting these, and OpenSSL is a stamp collector's library, if a cipher exists and you can implement it, why not? So you get this unwieldy list nobody actually needs, and then apps present it to non-experts like "Pick from this list or be doomed".
You can get advice on how to configure web servers from Mozilla, https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/
For other types of TLS server you should seek advice from experts in the appropriate protocol.
In TLS 1.3 they learned from this mistake and discourage cryptographic nationalism, you have a literal handful of choices, all of them are currently believed to be safe, some are likely poor (slow, power hungry) choices on simple hardware, some would be weak if large quantum computers were actually cheap and readily available, rather than horribly expensive and non-existent. So "I don't care, whatever" is thus safe in TLS 1.3 although presumably OpenSSL still expects you to actually pick anyway.