I'm possibly being unfair to CP/M there. Its user interface was on occasion better than u-boot's.
But in the early 1980s IBM came along with this program named SETUP for its PC. It was menu driven and full-screen.
Although originally loadable from floppy disc, by the 1990s it was generally in ROM, and had colours and used function keys and had list boxes and had little help messages that were even sometimes helpful.
By the 1990s, IBM had invented its Boot Manager, originally with OS/2 and PC-DOS but later cloned by others, that sat in a type 0A partition and gave a menu of bootable things, complete with human-readable partition descriptions that one could edit with FDISK and LVM.
And now it's 2025, and for machines that post-date the 1990s by a decade, I have a choice between something that sits in boot virus areas and names partitions "(hd0,msdos2)" and something that gives one flashbacks to PIP and ERA.
Or Microsoft Windows.