This is debatable. There are cases where users wants this enabled by default. But Adobe might have some stats regarding taking a decision based on usage and what makes more sense for general user experience.
This has been reported to the engineering under the internal reference SITES-22560. The product team will triage this request to verify feasibility based on the prioritization model. This post will be updated according to the Jira status.
@HKobayashi This is functioning as intended. We encourage you to consider another perspective: if we were to change the default setting to "off," many customers and users would encounter the opposite issue, with child pages appearing to be "missing" during the launch.