switching things on and off is getting harder

Several design patterns are conspiring to make it harder to switch things on, and off, and to take things up from standby.  This is probably best done by example.

I recently tried switching on a current macbook air.  It had an empty battery and I had just connected power.  I didn't know where the power button was supposed to be.  I tried the fingerprint button in the corner, but nothing happened.  At some point, some indicator may have appeared on the screen that it was charging.  Later, I went back, and powering it on worked.  So it can't power on from the live power connection, it has some minimum in the batter?  Without any feedback from the device on what's happening, this is squidgy.

Same with a thinkpad x1 carbon (8th gen) here.  Thinkpads used to last weeks powered off, but they now have some standby thing that drains the battery.  Power button is a bit more guessable here, but still not well marked.  That it's charging is indicated by an orange light by the (USB C) charging port -- good.  But pressing the power button won't power it on -- bad.  I guess it's a minimum charge thing again.  So I wait some hours, and try again.  Squidgy.  By a silly happenstance, this is the only laptop I can check a particular email account from.

Same with iphone and androids.  If they run out of battery, you can't just connect a power supply and power on.  You have to wait for it to charge, and then do it.  In all cases, there is no feedback, and it's squidgy.j

Switching things off is also getting worse.  To really switch off a PC "architecture" computer, you used to have to hold down the button for 5 seconds.  A few years ago, in one of the x1 carbon generations, it had become 10 seconds.  It now seems to be a mixture of 5 and 10 seconds.

Waking things up from standby is not faring very well, either.  To replay a CD that was already in used to be one button: play.  Then the EU brought in regulations that things had to go into standby mode by themselves, brought to you by the same geniuses that made the EU cookie directive.  But the manufacturers didn't design well the process of waking up from standby.  I suspect they could have had their appliances go into low-power mode and transparently wake up when required to do something, not requiring the user to care about standby states.  If they had just made it so that pressing play woke up the CD player, and pressing standby woke up the amp, this would have been annoying but okay.  Instead, getting a CD plus amplifier back to life is a project in fiddling and debugging.  The Yamaha CD deck, the only model Yamaha currently sells, does not have a way to wake it up without the remote.  You have to press the hard power button twice: once for hard off, once for on again.  Once you've done this, it isn't yet listening for presses to play.  So you have to wait a set amount of time, and then press play.  The NAD amp is also asleep, and lacks a "wake up" button.  If you press one of the source buttons, it does wake up.  Not ideal, and doesn't select source.  There doesn't seem to be a way to select-source-and-wake-up in one press, and again you are left waiting until it is receptive to further button presses.  Sad.