I suspect it's a case of the "designers" being addicted to the "new and fresh" paradigm and not caring about anything but trying to redesign everything they can.

I'm not a fan of regulation either, but I have a feeling that if the operation of the steering wheel or pedals weren't standardised, we'd have even crazier car UIs with their own self-consistent-but-globally-inconsistent designs. ("Turn the steering wheel clockwise to make a left turn --- because you're changing the view in the windscreen, not the content behind it!")

The regulation that required the shift quadrant to be in the PRNDL order many decades ago seems almost quaint in comparison:

https://jalopnik.com/why-prndl-5870701

(...and as the mentions about the horrible Jeep shifter in the other comments here allude to, maybe that regulation has laxed over the years.)