This is somewhat compounded by the fact the QWERTY layout itself is an inefficient legacy remnant of typewriters, whereby the most utilised keys would have a tendency to stick together if placed side by side, so QWERTY was envisaged as a way of spacing out these keys across the keyboard. Not for ergonomics or efficiency, but as an engineering workaround.

There appears to be some disagreement on whether that is true, for example, in this paper: https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433...