I might go with “because they are lazy” for many of the shortcuts we take. We have one well-seasoned cast-iron pan and several not-so-well-seasoned which I’ve been too lazy to properly treat, so for now I spend the extra time scrubbing. I even use soap (!), though only after the dog gets the big stuff off. Teflon pans required too much care, so we never repaced them.
I agree that rice sticks easily to iron pans, so I usually cook rice in inox/stainless saucepans or in ceramic in the pressure cooker.
Eggs we cook in the seasoned iron pan.
We can change our habits so that we don’t do so much harm to life on earth.
I think that you are correct in most cases, people choose nonstick for the easy cleanup afterwards. But that's not what I'm referring to. I have not found a pan, other than PTFE coated, which can fry rice to crispy without using excessive tons of oil. All of the best crispy rice will get stuck to the pan and become inedible.
When you tried the carbon steel pan, was it properly seasoned? They stick like hell before they are well seasoned, but seasoning them gives the carbon steel its non-stick properties. Woks are the ultimate tool for this, as they are carbon steel (so non-stick when seasoned) and their shape minimizes the amount of oil necessary to fry the rice. It is ubiquitous for fried rice across almost all of Asia.
Yeah but they use a lot of oil in those woks, and they get them really hot. Any Chinese street vendor with an open fire and cheap steel wok can do shit I can't dream of doing in my fancy ass American kitchen.
J Kenji Lopez-Alt has a lot of great wok content for American kitchens. In [0], he uses a butane torch to get the smoky wok flavor (wok hei) in a standard kitchen. He also reviews outdoor wok setups for those who want something close to Chinese street vendor-type vibe.
I cook with my carbon steel somewhat often, and it seems to have built up a nice thin black layer that keeps most things from sticking. Cleaning is a breeze, some dish soap and a couple scrubs. None of the black layer comes off.
Rice does not stick at first, but as it gets hot it does, unless I put around 3x the oil I would prefer. I have a gas range with a large burner so it gets very hot.
This is my experience as well. I also use a lot of slowly sauteed garlic, like pretty much every day, and I'm completely reliant on a small nonstick pot to do it without sticking and burning.
Scrambled eggs too, especially the soft-scrambled kind ala Gordon Ramsay's famous short video. They simply wipe out of nonstick pan, and I've never seen this work with any other kind of cookware.
People don't just choose PTFE because they are lazy. I tried a carbon steel, cast iron, and "oiled enamel" and rice stuck to all of them.