It's because the former is much easier/better if you don't also do the latter. The harder thing gives you the easier thing as a side effect, yes, but you could

It's because the former is much easier/better if you don't also do the latter. The harder thing gives you the easier thing as a side effect, yes, but you could just do the easier thing directly and not do the harder thing at all. Zig's "zig cc" command is an example of a system that gives you the former without doing the latter. If you ONLY care about simplifying your CI for cross-compilation builds, take a look at Zig as your C/C++ compiler frontend.