> The F-keys are still widely used people and make sense to be their own key for a LOT

That varies quite a bit between individuals. Doing native mobile dev work under macOS, I can count the number of times I need an F-key in an entire month on a single hand. They don't get used anywhere near enough to need their own row.

That said the presence of an F-row doesn't bother me — it's not as if they're hurting anything by being there — but there are no keyboards with both an F-row and my preferred layout (the HHKB/Tsangan variant of 60%) so few of my keyboards have F-rows.