it will come back on after toggling airplane mode, you're not silly, the design decisions in iOS are difficult to circumvent;
It isn’t silly at all, if you consider most people don’t care about the internal state of some radio, but are opening the quick toggle menu for the purpose of connecting/disconnecting to specific networks. It is more mentally consistent if you realize they swapped the on/off button in the quick access menu for a more useful button: the network selector (long press to access it). Both functions are still present in the full settings as always.