oh god, I was made to be an idiot when I once told someone they would need a crossover cable to do what they wanted to do a few years ago...

If it makes you feel any better... for some reason there are some currently in production business jets that still require crossover cables for maintenance... so they ARE still required sometimes.

I've also dug further into my parts bin thinking "oh, that yellow cable would've been perfect, but I need a non-crossover cable"... could've used the yellow one instead of digging further. Ah well.

Security through obscurity?

You encounter this in older industrial equipment. Some of the old ethernet chipsets don't support automatically switching the pairs around. It's not really a problem since at least in our local area they need to be installed by licensed cablers who are used to dealing with legacy devices.

Many devices won't get updated until chipsets go EOL or there's some other compelling reason to do so.

Having said that, modern chipsets seem to all support it.

Together with 1Gbit ratification, so ~2000