The fact that said protocol is incapable of addressing real needs is a failure state, and historically this has been addressed by building better tooling on top of the protocol, or replacing it wholesale.
Sure, the user sent stuff to the wrong address... Or did he? Seems, rather, that he sent the wrong kind of stuff. Had he sent, whateveritwas, WETF in stead of WETH or vice versa, then it would have gone right.
So then it seems the receiving thingamajig was at least as much at fault: It accepted (and just swallowed) a kind of stuff it shouldn't receive. It's like, say, a one-way currency-changing ATM that takes dollars and returns euros. If you feed in euros by mistake, it fucking obviously should just spit them back out (and preferably display or print an error message, "Wrong currency: Gimme dollars to get euros.") You're saying just swallowing your euros would be a "valid" behaviour for that machine.
That's so obviously bullshit that the only remaining mystery here is whether you're actively trying to defend what you know is indefensible, or actually so deluded that you've somehow convinced yourself this bullshit is true. Well, no, not the only one: The other mystery is, which is worse?
It's the "right" address for certain transactions--like turning ETH into WETH--but the "wrong" address for other transactions, which makes the whole thing a garbage design. You can say "that's just the way Ethereum/crypto/smart contracts work" all day, but it doesn't matter.
Most people don't care why the design is bad, they just care that it is bad, and that there are better theoretical (or real) alternatives to this tech.
The arguments here are odd. The blockchain isn't built to handle this kind of operation by a non-expert user. Yes, mistakes are expensive. Is that okay? In the same way that a nuclear power plant isn't designed for a rando to go in and operate it.
Yes, raw blockchain stuff is hard and non-experts should not interact directly.
The key question is, is the payoff worth building an entire system around? For nuclear power, yes, because it provides electricity for people to just plug into. For blockchain, maybe, maybe not.