I'm not quite this cynical. I think car manufactures got all excited by the tech (in part due to Tesla just lazily slapping in a huge touchscreen and getting lots of coolness points for it, and in part due to the massive success of Android / iPhone / iPad), and decided they wanted cars to have that too. Car manufacturers are roughly 5 years behind current tech, so they rushed into touchscreens and by the time they got their products to market, the tech felt dated and the UX was never well thought out.
However, smarter car manufacturers learned from that and are now moving away from the touchscreen-only controls now, using them just for auxiliary needs or for things that really require them (like GPS navigation).
Consider the the Gen 1 Volt, where 99% of all buttons are identical touch-only pads. http://hanabi.autoweek.com/sites/default/files/styles/gen-12... As much as I love this car, this console is a huge UX disaster every bit as bad as a touchscreen-only car, and doesn't even earn any 'coolness' points for doing it.
Then in the Gen 2 Volt, they went back and put in lots of distinct physical buttons and dials for those previously-touch-only actions https://electromotivela.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/chevy... Not perfect, but this is a massive improvement over the prior model.