They don’t work well for product development. I’ve worked in consumer and medical product development for 30+ years. I’ve worked as a consultant or contractor or directly for companies from startups to Fortune 50.
So many small companies or even teams at big companies don’t know about the standards that they should follow (ISO, ASME, UL etc) or if they do they don’t want to pay for them. Then there’s the complexity of tracking licenses and copies with electronic downloads, which I promise you no one does 100% right. There are third parties who will track this for companies but I’ve never managed to get anyone to use them.
It’s hard to even get everyone I’ve worked with to follow ASME Y14.5, which is the drawing and dimensioning standard for mechanical engineering (in the US).
Part of the challenge is that so many of these standards are broken up into 50 different parts that are purchased separately. Oh, you want to know how to dimension castings, that’s a separate document. Abbreviations to use on drawings, that’s separate. Drawing formats, that’s separate. Etc.
The result is that people collect old PDFs they “found” somewhere, and no one has a complete, up to date set of standards for any field. Even if someone at a company tries to get people to pay for standards, they maybe put them on a shared drive somewhere and they aren’t properly licensed for the team.
The results are that standards aren’t known or properly followed. Which is supposedly the purpose of standards orgs, but most of them use publications as a source of income, which defeats their purpose.
There are a few standards like USB, which are free to download. This should be universal.