For some reason I still cannot fathom, the 50-cent saving is a point of great pride to electrical engineers. They repeat some phrases about million-unit manufacturing runs and I just seethe with anger that we can't have nice things.
But because of economies of scale, you don’t just pay the difference in BOM cost, you pay that difference plus the difference in fixed costs divided by a much smaller unit run.
USB UPSes exist, and they’re really not that niche. Amazon has one for $50. That’s mass-market pricing as far as electronics are concerned.
As an engineer you are given a power budget, a thermal budget, a size budget, a weight budget and a monetary budget, among many other constraints. This means, like any engineering endeavor, there are tradeoffs to make. That 50-cents you saved on some power controller might be "spent" somewhere else that has a higher impact on the product.
There is a near infinite set of things you can do to make the product better somehow. Unfortunately you don't get to do them all. Many of the things conflict with eachother--more battery life might mean more weight and size that you have to "steal" from some other aspect of the product to balance out. Faster, better charging might cost 50-cents but that might mean in order to stay on budget you'd have to use a lower quality plastic shell that is more prone to damage. That faster, better charging might also eat into your thermal budget, meaning you'll need to spend more on cooling, weight and size.
It's all tradeoffs. There is no free lunch.
It goes like "They'll never know the difference!" and pretty soon you've gone from a premier brand to a cheapo outsourced-to-China generic product.
Usually it's to make things simpler... but occasionally they will add complexity as long as it makes stuff harder...
Their second favorite is complaining when people make things easier.