Something I never understand:

Why is this not the default?

So many people struggle with the same stuff over and over again, yet, there's no mechanism in Linux distros to package default settings for a use case.

You want a stable, easy-to-use platform. Setting /var/log to something other than the main disk risks all kinds of difficult to diagnose problems. If that means burning through SD cards, so be it. It's relatively easy to mod it to write elsewhere, that's exactly the purpose of user customization.

What they ought to do is put an easy way to set that in `raspi-config`

You can solve most of these problems by not using an under powered or bad power supply. From what I have seen most raspberry pi users love to just take a random charger and plug it into their raspberry pi. Micro usb has been known to be totally inadequate as a power delivery mechanism for SBCs and on the armbian forums people are going to complain if you show them an SBC with micro usb. USB C is a lot better but you are still better off with the official raspberry pi power supply.

What is right for Raspberry Pi might not be right for a desktop might not be right for a server.

Typically things are geared for desktop users who have not much idea what they are doing and everybody else is expected to understand and configure to their needs.

Nowadays distributions started preparing separate profiles (workstation, desktop, embedded, etc.) that save a little bit of work.

noatime is a default for most distributions but a person that does install on Raspberry Pi might be configuring filesystem manually and not be aware to put it there.

Swap is very tempting to have on the Pi but is going to kill the card in a hurry.