I've also dug further into my parts bin thinking "oh, that yellow cable would've been perfect, but I need a non-crossover cable"... could've used the yellow one instead of digging further. Ah well.

Security through obscurity?

You encounter this in older industrial equipment. Some of the old ethernet chipsets don't support automatically switching the pairs around. It's not really a problem since at least in our local area they need to be installed by licensed cablers who are used to dealing with legacy devices.

Many devices won't get updated until chipsets go EOL or there's some other compelling reason to do so.

Having said that, modern chipsets seem to all support it.