This summarizes the realism thing better than I ever could. It's tedium of tedium's sake, basically.
Additionally, there is a pattern with most of the features that become controversial. They tend to:
1. Start off incomplete.
and
2. Prioritize implementing the elements that are detrimental to the player first, and stuff that enhances gameplay is lower-priority.
An example is filthy clothing. It was kinda really bad and bare-bones on first implementation. Washing machines, detergent, sane usage of water/soap? All of those came AFTER first implementation, last I checked. Even now you still can't boil anything clean except for the older "make clean rags from dirty ones" idea.
Another example, the issues with perishable non-perishable foods. The way ingredient rot translates into product rot is bad and severely cripples the effective shelf life of the product. Meanwhile, shelf lives are pegged to assuming floor pasta anyway, but you have NO way to simply put the food in a bag. Realistically, rot is a non-issue for most dry goods if stored in most containers that are tightly recloseable (like a glass jar, plastic tupperware, etc). But this feature was not given any real thought when, in my opinion, allowing the player to implement proper storage should've been a prerequisite.
This is why I expressed the sentiment previously that realism only gets prioritized if it's to the player's detriment in some way. Because while that is hyperbole in the general case, there is a very solid foundation to make one suspect that's the case.