In my opinion, part of the issue was getting confidence in the "separate from compiled" feature. I would have to dig into some history to figure out when NI started using it for vi.lib. But shortly after that, it would make a lot of sense to push this in the drivers. So if you really want to play the hindsight game here, it is something that should have been feasible around 5 years ago. But NI was putting all of its marbles into NGX at that time.
Regardless, I am happy about this feature and I look forward to being able to avoid updating drivers purely for the "new LabVIEW version support" and no other changes.