I honestly believe this is still the case today.

How many people voted for Biden because he promised to forgive student loans? Something that causes terrible inflation, wrecks our already strained debt, and only benefits themselves?

How many people voted for Trump because he promised to cut taxes at the expense of our budget? Something that causes inflation, wrecks our already strained debt, and only benefits themselves?

People are very short sighted and vote very selfishly. Not everyone, but a large chuck of Americans are this way, and this is why every candidate usually throws in a couple promises like this just to appeal to those selfish voters.

I mean, it really depends on your line of work. I work in physics and I often just say 1e-9 m instead of converting to nm. Or I'll say 1e-4 in instead of .1 mil (a mil is one thousandth of an inch). So I just don't care what unit system I work in when I do science related work, as long as the units are explicitly stated so that you don't compare inches to mm on accident.

I have multiple relatives in construction though and they seem to like being able to just divide boards into thirds without dealing with decimals.

In the end though, now that everyone has calculators in their pockets, it's all arbitrary. It's so trivial to convert between different units and unit systems.

That's not a common measurement. So like if someone wants to split something in half, or thirds or fourths it's easy to measure on the fly with feet/in. How often do you hear someone say "I want to cut this board into 2/7th pieces"?