Absolutely not disputing what you say. However 99% of people have no more than a handful - especially if you have wildcard certificates. And the incidental com

Absolutely not disputing what you say. However 99% of people have no more than a handful - especially if you have wildcard certificates. And the incidental complexity of running certbot (even without the validation changes) are not worth it. You are the perfect usecase for certbot. The rest of us aren't. I'm not sure what you mean that the process can break. The way to use certificates are through haproxy/nginx/apache which are definitely more tested and stable than certbot. Half the internet still uses them and they support much more legacy than LE. Letsencrypt was disruptive because it was free. It was not disruptive because of certbot.