Why do games have such terrible inventory systems?

There’s some kind of evil extradimensional entity that makes developers simultaneously create huge, expansive open worlds for players to explore while also including a crafting system to make things. But since that’s not enough, said crafting also works through collecting a sometimes downright Byzantine array of components, and then making those components exist within an inventory system that quickly caps out, forcing you to hoard everything and find places to dump it all. Like, say, the floor of your apartment.

I’m always astonished at games that force you to play Tetris with a ridiculously ornate bunch of stuff in your inventory so that, as an example, you could literally end up with the rib bone of some dead yak from Pandaria in your backpack for five expansions straight. Yes, looking at you, World of Warcraft.

Now, I understand that in real life there’s a limit to how much stuff a human being can carry. I really do understand what the goal is. But I also firmly believe that once I begin carrying around two swords the size of small outrigger canoes and hitting people with them while riding on the back of a dragon, disbelief isn’t just dead, it died by suspending itself. If I can control the very forces of gravity like I do in Starfield, are you honestly telling me I can’t just make all the stuff inside my bag weightless?

Having piles of raw ore in my kitchen is inconvenient and irritating, but it’s better than having to leave stuff knowing it’ll despawn as soon as I zone out of a place. Likewise, linking how much stuff you can carry to arbitrary bag sizes while also making items take up an entire piece of that inventory real estate means people are always hunting for newer, bigger bags with more spaces and also demanding that things stack in order to keep fifty goose heads from overflowing your bags. And before you ask, no, I’m not just some weird  goose murderer, it’s for a quest.

Inventory in games has so many ways to be awful that I thought I’d ask you for your examples now, whether it’s the constantly shifting Mass Effect method of transforming your various guns into ooze that you can smear on things to repair them or the Diablo method of having one bag with a limited amount of spaces so you could literally carry a fifty thousand ton Devil Elk as long as it was smaller than 20 or so squares.  Why do video games take the best thing about this kind of gameplay — the fact that it’s all math and none of it is real anyway — and ruin it by making it just as painful as dealing with the clutter in my actual house?