RVA23 is, finally, the belated admission that maybe we shouldn't have everything as optional extras. Hopefully it'll take off, I can't imagine what sort of a headache it is for maintainers of repos who have to track a dozen different variants of binaries depending on which flavour of RISC-V the apt-get is coming from.
RVA23 (and RVA20 before it) aren't an admission that Risc-V got it wrong. It's a necessary step to make Risc-V competetive in the desktop space as opposed to micro-controllers where the flexibility is hugely valuable.