FWIW - I ride very light tubular rims (wall thickness >1mm new) and have never given a thought to rim wear, despite many thousands of all weather miles. Then again, brake usage per mile on the open road is very low.
OTOH - my commuter went 25,000 all weather urban miles, with lots of brake use. It did reach the point where I knew I was about to wear out my first rim (ever, in 50 years)
This indicates to me that you live in an area where you don't either don't have abrasive conditions, or very flat, or both?
The longest I've ever got a pair of year round commuter rims to last is just over 12,000 miles, and that was a pair of very thick heavy rims, half that on something like and Open Pro/Sport is not unusual.
It may very well be overblown for you, but for other people it is a genuine issue and as you rightly say, has always been. With a lot of higher end modern rims being £50-100 (what's that in USD, 80-140?) there's only so many times you can stomach throwing away another worn out rim before you start to look at either cheaper or heavier duty options.
And that's if you have the skills to rebuild your own wheels, fortunately I do, but it's common practise in local clubs to buy a pair of cheap Shimano 500/501 or bottom rung Mavic or Fulcrum wheels for the winter/trainer bike, run them for a year or so then bin them when they're worn out as the cost of re-rimming them is about the same as new set. I've lost count of the number of wheels donated to the local co-op with hubs in near perfect condition and either very worn, splayed, or actually split rims, and I promise you I'm not imagining it, we save some of the best examples for training courses, chop out a section and use them to show internal construction and failure modes. Also when I was still building wheels commercially, re-rimmings due to wear was probably ~50% of my workload.
If you don't suffer rim wear that makes
you lucky, but your luck doesn't stop others wearing theirs out, sadly...I'd be a lot more inclined to posh rims if I could get the kind of wear rates you seem to.
One interesting side-effect that the emergence of discs on road bikes has had is that where as before people would have a few sets of 'best' wheels for racing and time trialling, but slap on the winter training wheels for everything else, now people are splashing out on super-dooper sets of (normally carbon) wheels and just using them year round now they don't have to worry about wearing them out. Likewise, a lot of people are using their fancy bikes year round now and just slapping on a cheaper chain and cassette over winter instead of running a dedicated winter bike. That's not something I was expecting when discs started appearing, but its a noticeable behaviour shift.
I'm too fond of my C+V stuff to go down that route though!