Strange. We had the tech in the 90's, they were called camcorders. We had it in the 00's, they were called point-and-shoot cameras. I know around 2010 Canon's point-and-shoot cameras, at least some compact stylish consumer ones, knew their focus, on top of being able to reel in the lens to stow away when not in use.

Weird that there are no 3rd party lenses that exploit "software"/"motor" to escape the parfocal optics restrictions while properly exploiting the short backfocal distance of something like Sony E-Mount (vs. e.g. EF-S). With the ultrasonic, very fast AF motors, they can't tell me that an encoder ring for focus pull haptics in lieu of camera-side controls designed for the task would suffer too much input lag. And at the better quality end, the freedom from decoupling zoom and focus should make up for the cost of putting a motor inside, instead of just using an external remote focus pulling clamp. (That said, just adding a focus ring rotation sensor to offset the AF might even be possible to hack onto an existing lens, depending on the AF motor control scheme. A tiny dongle on the side near the base where one doesn't grip seems unintrusive to me.)

It’s an example of lenses designed for different workflows. Film style shoots it’s not uncommon to swap out a lens in between shots, and focus is sometimes a creative choice. Autofocus doesn’t work when you actually want to shift the focus from one actor to the next without them or the camera moving. You need manually focused lenses with precise control of the focus ring. With touch screens you can get close, because you can tell the software what subject to track, but a good focus puller that’s following the emotion of actors is tough to recreate in software. This is also why they’re generally not designed to be parfocal. Film shoots very rarely zoom the lens while recording.