I mean, yeah, it makes sense. You can reasonably expect chargers/cables not to be quite this jacked up, and in turn, you save space in a space-constrained device. It's just a hard pill to swallow thinking that a stray cable could ruin my device like that.

(Power dissipation aside, I did manage to find some smaller Schottky power diodes that could easily handle the current. There's also the possibility of using a MOSFET, which would turn into Rds(on) * Iavg, so something like 0.15W for Rds(on)=50mOhm, which is much more manageable. I'm just a shade tree electronics guy, so I realize there was probably enough data to make a decision to forego said protection.)