I don't feel it's good to burden people with cognitive overhead in the name of "customizability," when most of them don't want to worry about how the thing they want to do happens.

You say that as if the programmers are forcing people to choose non-simple tools.

Yes, there do exist systems which have managed to get themselves the happy medium of simple-on-the-surface-but-customizable. But usually it's a choice between one and the other; that the tools that are simple are deliberately made non-customizable in order to have that simplicity, and the tools that are extremely customizable necessarily have added complexity in order to offer that customizability.

Take my favourite window manager, Fvwm. It does not offer a GUI for configuration, because any GUI would either have to be incredibly complex, or cut out half the options one can have for the settings. I love this window manager, because you can make it do practically anything. But the cost of that is that the configuration is done with text files, not a GUI.
Many people may not want to pay that cost, sure. But I don't want to be deprived of my lovely window manager because some people find it too hard.