All such things are like this.
For me, this is fascinating, mind-boggling, non-sensical, and unsurprising, all at once.
But I wouldn’t call it inelegant.
I seriously doubt that was ever true, except perhaps for a very brief time in the 1950s or 60s.
Linear programming is an incredibly niche application of computing used so infrequently that I've never seen it utilised anywhere despite being a consultant that has visited hundreds of varied customers including big business.
It's like Wolfram Mathematica. I learned to use it in University, I became proficient at it, and I've used it about once a decade "in industry" because most jobs are targeted at the median worker. The median worker is practically speaking innumerate, unable to read a graph, understand a curve fit, or if they do, their knowledge won't extend to confidence intervals or non-linear fits such as log-log graphs.
Teachers that are exposed to the same curriculum year after year, seeing the same topic over and over assume that industry must be the same as their lived experience. I've lost count of the number of papers I've seen about Voronoi diagrams or Delaunay triangulations, neither of which I've ever seen applied anywhere outside of a tertiary education setting. I mean, seriously, who uses this stuff!?
In the networking course in my computer science degree I had to use matrix exponentiation to calculate the maximum throughput of an arbitrary network topology. If I were to even suggest something like this at any customer, even those spending millions on their core network infrastructure, I would be either laughed at openly, or their staff would gape at me in wide-eyed horror and back away slowly.
I’m not saying these things have zero utility, it’s just that they’re used far less frequently in industry than academics imagine.
Part of the reason why linear programming does need t get used as often is that there are no industry standard software implementation that is not atrociously priced. Same deal with Mathematica.
The triangulations you mention are important in the current group I'm working in.
PS: My point is not that these things are never used, they clearly are, I'm saying that the majority of CPU cycles globally goes towards "idle", then pushing pixels around with simple bitblt-like algorithms for 2D graphics, then whatever it is that browsers do on the inside, then operating system internals, and then specialised and more interesting algorithms like Linear Programming are a vanishingly small slice of whatever is left of that pie chart.