Why does the struggle mechanic still exist?

Seriously, what? The struggle-on-hook is on the level of "Moris screw the game flow up dramatically" in terms pernicious game mechanics that serve no purpose, other than to purely frustrate and aggravate players. It has the following downsides:

• It's flatly just annoying. You slam a key over and over. It's "Press X to not die." This is literally the name of a page on TV Tropes, that is how stupid it is. It isn't "tense" or whatever the devs think it is. Maybe the first couple times, you're going "Oh no, I hope someone saves me!" After that, it is pure aggravation for every DBD match you will ever play until the end of time.
• It's prone to lag or mistimed presses screwing you over. I have never introduced a player to this game who didn't screw up the struggle mechanic the first time or two, even when I explained the hook phases to them beforehand. This a really negative first-time user experience, because the player feels like the game cheated their chance out of them. This is the kind of thing that makes players stop coming back after a couple matches.
• I have seen people claim every now and then that they accidentally break or damage their keyboard doing this. I know the defense brigade is going to jump in with "Just change it to a different key" or whatever, but this is a stupid problem to have to begin with.
• It gives players an easy way to disconnect without the penalty. It allows them to screw the rest of their team over without any kind of punishment. I cannot count how many times there was a match we would have wound up winning against a Nurse or a Spirit or whatever thing that survivor didn't want to deal with, if they had just stayed in the match and not chosen to suicide on hook.
• It is not a choice. I mean, in the sense of "either do this or die," sure, I guess it is a binary win-or-lose choice, but that's not a real choice. So any arguments the devs want to make about it providing some sort of player agency are out the window, because it consists of nothing but mindlessly mashing a button.

And it has the following upsides:

That's it. Zero. There is nothing good about this mechanic. It doesn't make the game more tense, it doesn't serve a purpose, and it lets players screw their team over without repercussions. There would be literally no downside to just removing all input possibilities from the struggle phase -- just have the player sit on the hook until they get rescued or the timer runs out. No mash-to-struggle, no reversing it with a "Press X to die," just make the struggle phase be a passive thing, essentially just like the first hook phase without the option to try unhooking yourself.

The sad thing is that this is likely not far from being a "just change a number" level change a la Moris, that would improve everyone's quality of life, which means it will take Behaviour another four years to get to it, if ever.

There is no counterargument to this. Like, there is no good-faith position you can take that the struggle mechanic somehow adds something to the game. It is a bad, outdated mechanic that does not fulfill any goal of "tension" and has only negative repercussions. I don't want to hear it. I just want to see it changed. This mechanic is effing idiotic. The fact that it is still in this game, that is not far away from kicking off its SIXTH YEAR, is one of the most asinine things about Dead by Daylight. This is such a small thing that is SO AGGRAVATING and yet has a straightforward and clean solution.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk, now fix this terrible mechanic please. And don't kick this down the Feedback & Suggestions well, no one sees things there. This is here for discussion purposes, so others can discuss and debate.