You are right that we can use the Addresses 1 and 2 only or whichever address we want but my point of view was that most people do not know about this feature. They may even send some bitcoin to someone, and they won't even know that their rest of the UTXOs are already combined by the Electrum through change address.
What I always found peculiar about Electrum was that the software doesn't have the Coins tab enabled by default and that you have to make it visible manually from the settings menu on first installation. It helps greatly with consolidation but unless you already know about it or find the option in the settings, you wouldn't know it's there.