Sure it could be blamed on shitty distro maintenance and development but a better architecture would be putting essential things like filesystem drivers in /boot without this extra kludge of rebuilding an initrd (that you hopefully didn't forget to do before typing reboot) which depends on a pile of config files set just right (and oh by the way different in literally every distro).
Rebuilding an image isn't a big factor there, it's a tradeoff between making setup a bit more annoying versus making it a bit easier to manage your boot files.