Why it's there in the first place is fairly excusable. It (at least) halves the number of datagrams. Why people still resist it I'm not so sure about.

But on the other hand, it's a complicated architectural decision. US military wants absolutely reliable communications? They invent TCP which relies a lot on acks. Swedish telecom company wants fast and absolutely reliable communicating systems? Cue throw hands in air with a "there's no guarantees even with socks so better to simply never assume your message arrived and instead focus on detecting anomalous behaviour." They invent Erlang where there are no acks for messages.