I watched a video recently, which I can't find, where an architect set up a beautiful wooden baseboard around the entirety of their property, and that baseboard held all mechanicals and was perfectly clean and easy to get into as needed.

Drywall is manageable and cheap, I agree. But it's more painful than it should be for something that _will_ require maintenance.

This sounds great but violates all the building codes for a variety of reasons: eddy currents, risk of electrocution if there’s a short somewhere, noise in telecom cables, etc.