I find it a screw that Backspace deletes a highlighted region. It is
never what I want -- I always want to delete one character backwards.
I believe that the whole idea of active regions was a mistake, and even though it can be disabled, some Emacs code these days assume it's on to the extent that 1) it misbehaves when it's off, and 2) it gets turned on automatically when it's loaded (I'm looking at you, company-mode).
Without active regions, there would never be an expectation that backspace deletes anything but one character.