I fought against making the _current_ way to do compressed instructions a mandated part of the Unix profile, but RISC-V was (at least at the time) dominated by microcontroller people and there was a lack of appreciation of the damage it incurred. A lot of people far more senior than me couldn't believe what happened.

Interesting to contrast with Arm which upon defining Aarch64 did _away_ with variable length instructions and thus also page crossing ones. Maybe they knew something.