It's been in that position, above the left shift, in every keyboard I've ever used. And that includes typewriters, where the Caps Lock mechanically locked the shift key below it (which is mechanically linked to the shift key on the other side) on the down position; a quick press on the shift key released the lock. That is, it's a fact of life, like Ç being to the right of L; that key being anywhere else would be unusual.
> Indeed, does anyone ever actually use CAPSLOCK?
When typing a long sequence of uppercase characters, it's much more comfortable than holding down the shift key for the whole sequence. It affecting only letters, instead of everything like on a typewriter, doesn't matter much since it's normally used for a sequence of letters.
Ooh, I like that. Despite using a keyboard for many many hours every day, I've yet to build my own that exactly fits my needs; rather I remap and/or adapt. Gonna have to look into this.
YES I DO, PLEASE DO NOT JUDGE ME :)
Jokes aside - it's still useful when you're writing legal or other documents where certain phrases or sentences must be emphasised by placing them in all caps. A hold-out from the typewriter era when bold and italics were generally not available.
I also use it occasionally for writing assembly language, where it's conventional to write the opcode mnemonics in upper case. It also helps when doing reports on the kind of spreadsheet that uses upper case keywords as a kind of primary key, because you need to interact with people who think a relational database is something to do with geneaology.
(I put "properly" in quotes because many---even most---type in a different way quite successfully. But for me, it really helped reduce the number of mistakes I made. With caps lock, I don't have to mess that up when I write LONG_UPPERCASE_CONSTANTS.)
We've started folks into the habit of using double-tap on Shift as CAPSLOCK on mobile and soft keyboards, and there's no real reason we couldn't bring that same innovation to hardware keyboards. It's still a surprise that it doesn't seem an option in macOS and Windows. Free up that key left of A for backspace, control, or escape for everybody.