I wonder if this is a one-way street, that is, if a realization will come at some point that simple solutions to simple problems can be more robust...
I'd dispute it being over-engineering: media keys tend to control a mix of hardware and software (OS) features (looking at asus keyboards on the internet I see audio volume, mic mute, fan speed / perf governor, display off, brightness, projection mode, touchpad off, sleep, and airplane mode).
Given this, an OS driver is a requirement, and the OS further needs to access the hardware for obvious reasons.
This means you can either implement everything uniformly in driver (just bouncing from the interrupt to a hardware operation in the case of hardware features), or you can mix the implementation between firmware and driver.
Unless you have a very good justification to do so (which I'd very much dispute the existence of for gaming-oriented ASUS laptops) the latter seems like the over-engineering.
But you have to take software seriously as something that can improve a system, not just a cost centre to be minimised where possible, and an embarrassing source of problems that will ultimately end up in the newspaper or worse.
On the other hand, I'm not as optimistic about open-source BIOSes like Coreboot, whose only reason for existence seems to be "it's open-source!" --- that project has been around since the last century, yet still lacks any actual GUI/TUI for configuration, like any other BIOS has had since the late 80s.
There is no simply here.
You can’t list a litany of niche skills before implying that’s just life and it’s everyone fault they don’t have the time and knowledge to just, you know, casually reverse engineer and patch a binary.