It is bad ergonomics only on modern keyboards. Back in the day, there were keyboards with "lower case parentheses"[1].
Same case for vi - the : key was in a different place, and no Shift necessary[2].
Nowadays, I use a bespoke layout (in software) that solves the above two problems, among others. My number row is inverted, so parentheses become lower case, and I put the colon key next to 0 and Enter next to P.