Every single technology that lives long enough has legacy features like these and antipatterns. When compared to other software of similar age, this is remarkable little cruft.
Every tool that's powerful enough needs to have caveats. I agree it's a PITA, but this is orders of magnitude better than say, bash, C++, Linux, or PHP.
Every tool that's powerful enough needs to have caveats. I agree it's a PITA, but this is orders of magnitude better than say, bash, C++, Linux, or PHP.