Why would they decide to not allow changing equipment on companions ? What the hell were they thinking?

One of most joyful things in Mass Effect style games is equipping and building your companions as you want - both armor and weapons and then watching your build actually work on them. Why in the world would they remove this? What gain could possibly be there? Wasn't this game supposed to build up on the first one and upgrade what it could? I was already really sad it wasn't in Avowed but that's fine. Surely there is no way they would do that with Outer worlds 2 right?

Is this part of dumbing the game down for consoles or something? Like honestly, that drops the game for me by several points alone and probably overshadows whatever improvements they did over the first game. Such a dissapointment.