I think you may have a point, It’s kind of weird how the first 10 years of smartphones, was an ever higher climb for better phones, driven by competition.
But now that everybody are dependent on the phones, they all agree on taking useful features away???

Fuck. You’re probably right. It’s all about nudging us towards the behavior they want.

It’s probably also a little safer with only system apis accessing system hardware. If you look at how the camera assembly is one piece and apps basically access the whole thing securely.

I used to have a custom ROM that would allow me to change the color based on which app had the most recent notification

Even more than that, in early versions of Android this setting was baked in. I had colors set based on text messages, emails, etc. I think around 2.x was when the option was removed.

Ironically I was grateful for a custom rom to turn off the light. It was useful but I hated it at night because at least on my phone it was stupidly bright

Yet there are often warnings that even with OLED AOD eats a lot of battery, not so with a notification LED.
The absolute newest OLED that can do 1Hz refresh are better. But that doesn’t change that the removal of the notification LED was detrimental to the functionality of the smartphone.

I really can’t. I did it all. It just doesn’t come near the tiny lil LED shining bright.

And yet they don’t

I’m pretty sure mine has a tiny LED under the screen, that only shows very shortly on reboot. But as you say, it’s disabled for some weird reason.