This complaint makes me uncomfortable on behalf of the project creator. He didn't set out to create switches from scratch, he wanted to create a keyboard. You didn't care that he used a prebuilt microcontroller or USB cable.

Switching from keycaps to some substitute wouldn't be technically harder to pull off, it would just reduce usability. Same for switches -- the input/output of these switches is created with keyboards in mind, other switch choices including a homemade version would be possible, but he didn't set out to create 100 switches, he wanted to make a keyboard.