The ridiculous restore mode you’re speaking of is a break glass in case of last resort type thing, where you the user have screwed up your disk so badly that you have messed up the recovery partition and system , which is as simple as holding cmd and R during boot to get into.

In fact they really went the extra mile to ensure that you cannot possibly brick a Mac (or iDevice) no matter how hard you try. Having to do an emergency restore usually needs specialized hardware anyway; they ensure you can do it with widely available equipment. Go the Apple store if all else fails you.