Actually, I am going to close this topic: there is a lot of circular discussions, demands, and venting, and Discourse is not a place for this stuff.
I’d rather have people invest their energy and motivation in making a positive change, instead; for instance:
- add a UI for the GSettings key in Tweak
- draft a list of existing workflows—as opposed to workarounds for bugs—inside GNOME that require terminating the session without powering off the machine
- if any of those workflows come from existing applications (settings, extensions, etc), add a UI for restarting the session in those applications
- run some simple/short user testing campaign to check what kind of response is coming from users when faced with one of those workflows
In short: figure out if the decision of removing session log out on single-user/single-session systems needs to be updated.