All of that stuff is used in industry because a lot of regulation (for things like aircraft) basically requires your control laws to be linear so that you can prove stability.
In reality, when you get into non linear control, you can do a lot more stuff. I did a research project in college where we had an autonomous underwater glider that could only get gps lock when it surfaced, and had to rely on shitty MEMS imu control under water. I actually proposed doing a neural network for control, but it got shot down because "neural nets are black boxes" lol.
Higher sampling rates can help in some cases, especially when tracking fast dynamics or reducing measurement noise through repeated updates. However, the main strength of the Kalman filter is combining a model with noisy measurements, not necessarily relying on high sampling rates.
In practice, Kalman filters can work well even with relatively low-rate measurements, as long as the model captures the system dynamics reasonably well.
I also agree that it's often something you design into the system rather than applying as a post-processing step.