At some point people need to abandon this idea that all needs and wants must align exactly so that we can have only one standard.

That's what we have extensions for.

But I don't think we're anywhere near your hypothetical state. On the contrary, my time in business has been dominated by designing and updating bespoke interfaces between bespoke systems. Everything is bespoke, at the industry level. Measurement tools are bespoke. Relational databases are bespoke. Transmission protocols are bespoke. Everything's a daisy chain of staging tables and APIs, as you get what is functionally interchangeable data from half a dozen different systems to tie out into the final accounting ledger.

Hell, we can't even get aligned to the metric system. Assholes are still running around talking about feet and gallons, until they cross a border and have to kick over to meters and liters.

I understand the pull for it, but it’s not realistic.

One of the most revolutionary ideas of the modern logistics system was the uniform shipping container. You had a pre-defined box size with well-established uniform characteristics that you could load up with whatever you pleased. Then you could load up a container in a factory, put it on a truck, take it to a train, move it onto a ship, sail it across the sea, unload it onto a train, that puts it on a truck, that takes it to a warehouse. And because everyone agreed to adhere to a single shipping container standard, the entire system of transit could be built to accommodate units of that size.

Not only is the idea realistic, it is essential to a modern efficient interoperable system.