I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.
The bar is pretty high. There are already hundreds of settings. Each one adds cost and complexity. So even if it's a good idea, the leadership might say "no".
Now let's say this same setting makes a big difference in usability for some people with disabilities. You just want to put it in accessibility settings. It won't clutter the rest of the UI.
You just turned your "no" into a "yes".
This isn’t “hidden”. It was even called out and demonstrated in the iOS 14 keynote.
Most people don't go into that menu to look around for things they might want to use cause features that almost everyone could benefit from are alongside settings for people with visual and hearing impairments.
And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
<cough> Reduce Motion. Is it an accessibility feature or does it just get rid of an annoyance and is good for everyone?
Yes--some people can become ill with certain types of motion on a screen [1].
[1]: https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/understanding-vestibular-d...
Personally I forgot about it on my latest phone because I had a fresh prescription for my glasses and didn't need to enlarge the font at the moment :)
From outside, it feels like these are the only people with the freedom to improve the user experience at all. So they have to hide their work in the Accessibility preferences.
There's nothing that inherently "locks out" people who don't have a recognized disability from exploring these features. Furthermore, most of Apple's "accessibility" features are related to Vision/Hearing/etc (and categorized as such), so I think it's reasonable to consider them accessibility features.
Clearly based on other comments here, plenty of people discover these features and find them useful.
I'm glad the configuration is there, but it's hard to discover, so in and of itself it isn't accessible to find.