Sounds like a customer service issue, as a starter. In a long running business where "things just work" - due heavily as you point out to existing standards in product design, I can see the problems you ran into being an area that eventually starts to get overlooked at a large company; or perhaps there were people down the line who were pointing out this problem but no one at senior enough level with decision making power was design-product oriented?
My theory is that at a company that has a reputation of "disrupting the business" and being innovators, it's not easy to raise your concerns and tell everyone that maybe not all conventions are stupid, or even if they are, they are still conventions that the end users rely on for being able to interact with the car (change mirror, open the doors, change AC).
You either raise a stink about not following conventions and risk being fired immediately or sidelined forever, or you play along and the company finds out 5-10 years later that these decisions were really bad and it's not only YouTubers who hate the new designs. From a risk-reward point of view, I can see how employees decided that it's not worth it.
Yeah, I think this is why Elon Musk's companies can thrive - the flat "hierarchy" he's setup:
- try to hire very smart, competent, passionate people
- give them as much rope as they need, even if that means they hang themself
- when oversight-controllers see something as a problem in passing/review then course correcting
