Given that even Apple not only keeps the Caps key, but also has it traditionally big, I suppose the market demands it. But then who are those people who uses it?
Props to Apple, which in 2022 still provides an easy option to remap caps more or less straight in the keyboard configuration. And actually provides that even on iOS (which I was stoked to discover), though the remapping options are limited.
And boo to microsoft, the only significant OS where that’s not a native option, you need the powertoys and in my experience it’s quite unreliable: regularly capslock will revert and you have to go into the ‘toys and flip it off and on again.
I’ve never looked but I guess it’s some sort of registry setting which every update resets, without the ‘toys being aware of the info?
You press shift once and then the next key you press is capitalized (or a symbol or whatever).
And if you think "well, just keep shift pressed and use another finger to type what you would have typed with your pinky" it just means you're either not touch typing or doing it "wrong" :) There's a reason there are two shift keys on a keyboard, yet I rarely hear people complaining about this but plenty complain about the "useless" caps lock.
TL;DR: you can pry caps lock from my cold dead hands. I need it.
(ETA: maybe I should just remap double-shift to caps and be done with it, but that's just one more thing I have to learn and one more configuration I need to do on a new machine).
What surprises me are people who consider a certain key "useless" simply because they don't use it, so it should be removed/reassigned. And there's plenty of them in this thread who think that I'm doing it wrong by using the key for the exact job it was meant for.