How is it less beautiful?

Honest question, curious to hear about what that means to you.

To me it’s the fact that if you try to do it in real life (i.e. sorting a collection of objects in the real world), you just end up doing merge sort by accident.

So it feels like an optimization of merge sort for computers, rather than a different approach.

This is also reflected in the way that it’s usually taught. Normally merge sort is presented first, and quick sort follows from observations about what would happen if you picked different partition points instead of dividing them in half, and how you can reduce the additional space requirements.