No, it is absurd to claim that something which predates using base 2 based counts being common is designed to con people who work in that sort of unit.
Communications theory used 1,000s and such to state transfer rates as with any other scientific unit long before modern drives. That stuck when things were recorded to mediums such as tape, and every disk ever has been measured on 1,000s or 1,000,000s or …
There have been some oddities along the way: punched cards were all over the place and were measured in characters not bits/bytes, many comms methods too were measured in characters/symbols or modulations rather than bits & bytes, many comms and storage (tape, disk, and RAM/ROM) formats are not nice round powers of 2 in raw form due to check bits, parity bits, and stop bits.
The one and only occurrence I can think of where 2^10 was used officially for a physical storage measure is the 1.44Mb floppy format which was a strange bastard of multiple divisions: it was 1440KiB, so 1.4410001024, so really was either ~1.38MiB or ~1.47MB.
> Nowhere else in the computer is the base-10 version standard, and it shouldn't be.
Nowhere else in science nor enginerring is 2^10 the standard instead of 10^3, and it shouldn't be. In computing we've adopted 2^10 that because some things are easier for us to think about that way, and 2^10 and 10^3 are close enough for many estimating or quick calc purposes, but why should science that predates that practise being common be forced to change simply for our convenience?
Yes I support moving from imperial to metric where that hasn't already been done, but not because I encountered metric first (I didn't) so the other is unfamiliar but because it makes sense. You might argue that to programmers or less technical tech users 2^10 makes more sense, but they are less important in terms of science and engineering then, well, the rest of science and engineering.
> what's the max file size of a file stored on a FAT32 filesystem again?
2GiB, or approximately 2.147GB. Many people incorrectly calling it 2GB does not change that G as a prefix means 10^9 and not 2^31 - otherwise we have to accept other things like “u” being a correct spelling of “you”!
It isn't a grand conspiracy to defraud us. We chose to give those prefixes a double meaning, it isn't the rest of science & engineering's fault that we sometimes get confused by that choice that we made and they didn't.