This appears silly from an engineering perspective, but there is a specific motivation behind it: Proton (the mail company) wants this to simplify the implementation of PGP with Browser APIs.
As you said, too many optional ciphers are bad for compatibility. Note that the key preferences do not help with this mess. Users usually have one identity, but want to use it with different PGP implementations, e.g. on their phone and their PC. However, GnuPG's reaction to start their own standard is not helping either. Bodies like IETF have to find a true consensus, not only majorities, because there is no way to ensure proportional representation of developers, users or other stakeholders. The free software community is used to the problem that companies intentionally send new people into standardization bodies just to tip over the majority vote. We have seen this happen many times. In my opinion, the OpenPGP schism has this smell, too. Regards Stephan PS: I also criticized some features of the new OpenPGP standard personally, e.g. unnecessarily making signatures non-deterministic. But those are academic details not related to the schism. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/openpgp/uGHlHjeqo7VEZ55JO_7IcV-Q1Nk/
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