I think it's mostly due to the change in the makeup of the average "engineering" employee in corporations today. There's a very heavy emphasis on computer har

I think it's mostly due to the change in the makeup of the average "engineering" employee in corporations today. There's a very heavy emphasis on computer hardware and software knowledge, and much less on mechanical engineering and physical design. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you want to design a door handle with specific behavior and you understand software and electronics well but mechanical design less so, you design an electronically actuated door handle and do all the features in software. It's cheaper, too, honestly, because revising a software system is inherently cheaper than the design-manufacture-construct-test loop for mechanical design. But, as automotive design advances out of the technical design stasis it's been in for decades due to the dominance/barriers to entry of the US car industry, there's going to be a need for more advanced rules regarding what needs to be manual/mechanical vs. fly by wire. A similar regulatory regime already exists in aircraft design, which could be a guiding example.