But backtracking design seems like a very unApple thing to do.
They've done it before, and they've figured out how to do the storytelling around it.
As far as I'm aware they've only done it one time, going from the buton-less iPod Shuffle back to buttons
Nah, they backed away from the awful Bondi Blue iMac puck remote to a remote for human hands, they're about to do it with the Mac Pro (and they've already told some of the story around that), very arguably the new MacBook Air constitutes backing down from the MacBook in basically every way *but* the keyboard, rumor has it they're going to back down from 3D Touch, and it's certainly happened plenty of times on the software level (see for example the many times Expose has been rehashed in the history of Mac OS X after a new feature gummed it up, or the discoveryd fiasco).
I do think the challenge with the keyboard is that changing away from the butterfly switch design will likely require making the notebooks thicker again (the butterfly switch keyboards were always about the price of compromise so that the computers could be optimized for thinness+battery life at the expense of key travel - that's why Apple never even pretended they were going to adopt the design for their desktop keyboards). I don't think that's escapable, to be honest. It's increasingly clear that the keyboard reliability issues aren't just about crumbs and dust (certain heavily-used keys seem to be breaking much more often than others)
Maybe Apple's eventual plan is for the keyboards to just be full OLED displays with tactile bumps (maybe not even that? lol) and haptic feedback, and the butterfly switch keyboard is just a placeholder. I think that - until such futuristic things become possible - they're better off going back to a keyboard design (and a level of trackpad haptic feedback, tbh) that was basically universally loved when it was a thing, *even if* that requires compromises elsewhere. We'll see what they do.