I don't know how y'all type, but typically looking at a keyboard is only something you do for your first year after encountering a computer for the first time. After that, the keyboard takes up your desk, but isn't something you look at in order to use. Thus, keycaps optimized for looking nice while not in use makes more sense than keycaps optimized for being readable. You shouldn't be reading keycaps while you type, because you have a limited field of view and what's showing up on the screen is more relevant than what keys are being pressed.

So the designer doing "I can just focus on art" is probably experiencing more joy than the designer doing "this has to be as cheap as possible" or "this is a keyboard for children learning to touch type", simply because the scope of work is so much more unconstrained. Art could be anything! A keyboard for people learning to use computers is going to mostly be letters.