I agree completely with your point, especially the difficulty of developing the user's mental model for what's going on with context and the need to move away from chat UX. It's interesting that there are still few public examples of non-chat UIs that make context management explicit. It's possible that the big names tried this and decided it wasn't worth it -- but from comments here it seems like everyone that has built a production RAG system has come to the opposite conclusion. I'm guessing the real reason is otherwise: likely for the consumer apps controlling context (especially for free users) and inference time is one of the main levers for cost management at scale. Private RAGs, on the other hand, are more concerned with maximizing result quality and minimizing time spent by employee on a particular problem with cost per query much less of a concern --- that's been my experience at least.