It’s probably necessary for something along the lines of requiring a licensed engineer to sign off on these systems if private companies are going to manage critical infrastructure.
Also, due to past shenanigans with vendor lock-in schemes the Engineering Managers often have a valid concern for cryptographic/locked infrastructure and maintenance cycles. Ironically, right-to-repair legislation may slowly improve the situation.
It is not a technical problem, but a bureaucratic one =3
Our water, power, and Internet are all delivered by local co-ops. We actually do get a direct say in how the money is spent on our infrastructure.
It's one of the reasons why I have fiber Internet whereas the closest town (managed by for profit entity) is still fighting to roll it out years after we had ours run to us.
I also got reimbursed by the co-op for the water line to my house when we built the place.
I also lobbied the power board to prioritize tree removal near lines for a more reliable service.
The definition of rural to me is around 12k residents in a county that is around 1000 square miles. That's the size of where we are. The largest town is around 3k people. Two counties over is a city of about 40k. The 3k town is part of our co-op, so they have fiber. The 40k had less than 15% on fiber the last I knew, but that was two years ago. Since then they haven't run anymore lines, but have added customers on their existing lines.