the quality of life change we truly need

[Fyce]

If you are one of these people who don't want to automatically sort their inventory, you can simply remove the menu entry and then make a few /isort macros for when you need it.
Or you can put the [Sort] menu entry into the "Second Tier" submenu if you feel like it's overkill to do macro shenanigans. Putting it in its own submenu is probably misclick-proof enough.

Character config > Item Settings > Subcommand customization [Open] button.
It's a very powerful menu customisation tool that you don't see in a lot of MMOs. Yet a lot of player ignore it or don't even know it exists.