> there should be a function where the keyboard reports both the labels on its keys as well as the physical layout

You can move the keycaps around, though you'll find they don't all have the same height. Or wait until someone releases a keyboard with a small e-ink display in each keycap that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

QWERTY is not a problem. I have a dedicated layer just for games, which is actually a QWERTY/Colemak hybrid. The left side is QWERTY, as most game keys are bound near WASD, while the right side matches closely my Colemak key maps, so whenever I have to write text in QWERTY mode, I just have to mentally map from QWERTY the left-side. In practice, this is not a problem. Non-rebindable games are just small indie ones I find on itch.io that only use WASD. The rest that have in-game text chat I rebind, and Colemak anyway is very close to QWERTY not to make that effort too onerous. 99% of games are just WASD + TEF.

Re: QWERTZ and AZERTY: those are abominations and shouldn't exist. I use QWERTY everywhere + a dedicated Compose key for diacritics.

This is my layout: https://imgur.com/a/TpJMTBH

I can't help but notice nothing you're arguing is in relation to which part of the system should be doing the mapping from abstract keys to actual letters. As such I don't see anything to engage with…

(It's also a bit strange that you argue your freedom of choice to use Colemak and then immediately proceed to call two other layouts "abominations and shouldn't exist". And this is where I'm cutting my participation in this course, because even though I absolutely agree they exist, I'm not interested in discussing objective advantages of keyboard layouts over each other. If you're arguing ergonomics, you need to accept that for a lot of people the thing they're used to is the most ergonomic because the cost of adjustment far outstrips the benefits.)