Hi.

maybe you are right, maybe I'm old styled...
but
I Know that you can get an embedded 128Kb and maybe even
more... its a matter of availability and prices.
What if one day he Will needed 256Kb of ROM What Then ??
He Can use Internal And External Memory.
When you make a general board, you will want to cover all
the options, sometimes its more expensive and more complicated, but you know...
development is expensive than industrial.
What if one day he will try to do a voice recognition ??
d'ya think 8k is enugh ??
If you use any external periphery, then you use those ports
anyway, so its almost free.
When I Say ROM I Mean NVM : FLASH, OTP, PROM, EPROM, EEPROM SPI, RAM WITH BATTERY, EVEN ROM Itself(If you have money).

I Hope you got it...
have a nice day..
OK