While some very-important software like video codecs, and various sporadic projects where some drive-by open-source dev decided to add an optimized path will use vector, that's, like, on the order of 0.001% (number out of my ass) of all software that runs slowly enough to be noticable, and the remaining 99.999% remains slow. Much as I like working with SIMD/vector, it's a very tiny minority of people that do.
RVV does also actually make good use of scalar FP, with .vf instruction variants which take one operand from the scalar registers, allowing storing constants in the scalar registers instead of wasting vector registers (and with LMUL it's very easy to exhaust the entire RVV register file). Especially important in matmul kernels.
> What I am very sure of: nobody wants to design a clean and modern ISA to handle the "bad" programs
And yet that's what RVA23 & co basically have to be, and are. And as such they have scalar FP, vector FP, and basically everything else that's potentially useful (other than 3-source-operand instructions).
I do wonder how much compressed actually benefits perf-wise, but it's very clearly true that, at least icache-wise, reducing code size by, say, 20%, is equivalent to adding 20% more icache; and 20% of a typical L1 icache is quite a lot of area to save.