i don't ever want to one day be trying to consult a blockchain explorer and it won't show me some of my old transactions because it pruned them.
Then run your own node. No one is required to run a full node instead of a pruned node because you want them to.
Although it's probably worth pointing out that any blockchain explorer which prunes all transactions from x number of blocks ago would be useless to most users and would receive very little traffic.
the poor people probably use an app on their phone when it comes to bitcoin. come on now.
Maybe. Or maybe they actually care about the core principles of bitcoin and want to be able to verify transactions and blocks themselves and not have to trust third parties to do it for them.