As I was reading I thought “hey my Skoda seems to be ok with most of these things”, having gone for it more or less for the same reasons. Skoda seems to get it better. Is it because being a non-luxury tier car, they value function over form much more?

That correlates with my research too (which is at the end of the blog post if you read that far - fair enough if you didn't, it's a long post!). Skoda's design philosophy is "Simply Clever" and I guess they actually believe it rather than being a marketing gimmick.

https://www.skoda-auto.com/world/simply-clever