This! At a previous job we moved all our less expensive products to capacitive touch buttons and resistive touch screens because it's tremendously cheaper than

This! At a previous job we moved all our less expensive products to capacitive touch buttons and resistive touch screens because it's tremendously cheaper than physical buttons. Cap touch buttons or physical buttons both require a circuit board, so that costs the same, but cap touch buttons just need one big sheet of material with some screen printing placed over the circuit board. Physical clicky buttons require each button to be designed, manufactured, screen printed, and the clicky action to be tuned for feel and durability, none of which is cheap. Physical buttons may not all be exactly the same size and shape due to design considerations, so that's injection mold tooling variations, additional supply chain part numbers to manage, and additional ways that manufacturing can screw up assembly. Physical buttons can jam, get stuck, or fall out, so engineering time needs to be spent ensuring this won't happen 10 years from now, too.