Technology

THEY took the position we should have brackets defining the order in every single equation or otherwise have them as undefined TODAY

Who's this mysterious "THEY" you are referring to, because I can assure you that the history of Maths tells you that is wrong. e.g. look in Cajori and you'll find the order of operations rules are at least 2 centuries older than the use of Brackets in Maths.,

It doesn’t matter when they were invented

The rules haven't changed since then.

They are the one arguing it SHOULD BE

...and watch Physicists and Mathematicians promptly run out of room on blackboards if they did.

You’re getting caught up in the semantics of the wording

No, you're making up things that never happened.

they’re saying brackets were always around and we chose left to right to avoid bracket mess

and that's wrong. Left to right was around before Brackets were.

we chose and continue to choose to keep using the left to right convention over brackets everywhere

and you're wrong, because that choice was made before we'd even started using Brackets in Maths, by at least a couple of centuries.

it would be unnecessary and make things more cluttered

They've always been un-necessary, unless you want to deviate from the normal order of operations.

They could have decided we should use them in every equation for absolute clarity of order

But they didn't, because we already had clarity over order, and had done for several centuries.

Saying we should not do that based on tradition alone is a bad reason.

Got nothing to do with tradition. Got no idea where you got that idea from.

Things DO change.

The order of operations rules don't, and the last change to the notation was in the 19th Century.

I could go on

and you'd still be wrong. You're heading off into completely unrelated topics now.

you should argue more than “it’s tradition” or “we’ve done fine without it so far”

I never said either of those things.

Because they did fine with many things in mathematics until they decided they needed to change or expand it

And they changed the meaning of the Division symbol sometime in the 19th Century or earlier, and everything has been settled for centuries now.