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> That's mostly a positive thing for buttons on the center console

No, it isn't. It's just fashion, like high heels. Not to mention that it's mainly a cost-saving measure.

Your fingers want a spring-loaded button that has some travel and resistance before activating. You can feel the button without looking at it, and rest your finger on it before deciding to activate.

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BMW had a wonderful mashup of these technologies for the radio memory buttons on 2014 era infotainment modules. The buttons were proper real buttons, and they could be mapped to any function on the HMI, radio station, settings menu, GPS destination, etc. But you could also rest your finger on them without pressing and the capacitive touch would activate, showing you a preview of what was mapped to that button before you pressed it. It was a physical implementation of a mouse hover. We've really gone backwards on automotive HMI since then

I had a clever boss (circa 2002) who generated interesting ideas all the time. He came up with, why don't we just tack clear, plastic/rubber bumps onto the glass of the touch screen to create tactile buttons. He proof-of-concepted it and it worked.

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