I live in a third-world country where importing chips from abroad is expensive, unreliable, slow, and sometimes dangerous. There are circuits I cannot build because I cannot get the very specialized parts they need. Obviously a linear power supply that can measure how much current it's supplying is not such a circuit, unless you have very stringent precision requirements.
It would be to my benefit to figure out a relatively small set of parts I can buy, ahead of time, in bulk, to cover a wide range of possible circuits. Better still if they're so popular that local distributors have them in stock. An analog comparator probably needs to be in that set. A chip specialized for current measuring probably does not.
If you're designing a product for mass production that needs to be competitive in the market, you can't do it that way. Super-specialized parts will always have better performance, and usually better price/performance than overpowered general-purpose parts. (Also, you need to live in Shenzhen.) But hobbyists have other priorities.