If you were ever responsible for keeping a thicknet or thinnet Ethernet network running, you would gladly accept that tradeoff. If you've experienced a floor of a building or a whole department go offline because someone removed a terminator, or (this is real) decided to stick the thinnet onto their radio antenna to see if it improved reception, you'd value the increase in reliability a lot more than the extra cost.

There were actually these connectors you could get from AMP that would hide away the thinnet connection behind a wall plate, with proprietary connectors to the machine, just to keep people's hands away from the shared network segment.