Hi Scott Duffey,
while I understand your points, I consider this the "Intune technical perspective".
I confess:
I create a group for every configuration, compliance policy, and three for applications.
Just to keep the configurations and assignments easy to follow and easily customizable.
I have tried your way in the past and found it too difficult to identify all configurations, policies and applications that are assigned to the "engineering" group. I am not aware of an easy way to identify all configuration items one group has been assigned to. Is there a way (apart from PowerShell and the Graph API)?
Additionally, if I want to change assignments for the "engineering" group, I cannot do this from the group. I must visit all configs, policies and apps. Very time consuming and error prone.
There are policy sets and they sound really good.
But they don't support iOS VPP apps, no Win32 apps, and whatever else.
So at the end of the day, I can't use them.
If you want us to change our behavior, simply improve the manageability of Intune.

Best
Martin