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OpenGL actually had support for color index rendering. See glIndexi(), glClearIndex(), etc. I think it was primarily used for hardware overlay planes on graphics systems like RealityEngine.

That was back in the fixed-function pipeline day.

So I'd imagine it's just that a) very few people care any more and b) if you do care, it's trivial to do it yourself with a dependent read in your fragment shader.

https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Common_Mistakes#Paletted...

It's trivially done in shaders, there's nowhere to extend that.

Do game engines still use palettized textures to save memory?