The simple reason is that there are much more important design criteria than the goal of frustrating repair, which it has never really been proven that they do.
COB is a method of connecting a bare die to a board using bond wires. It is used on cheap electronics to save the cost of chip packaging. What is wrong with COB?
1. Since it connects bond wires from the top of the die to the board, the pads must be outside the die footprint. This is a total obstacle to dense PCBAs like on today's cellphones and computers. Additionally, the number of I/Os on the die itself is limited by wire bonding. More I/Os are possible with flip chips and especially with multilevel packages.
2. Chips are tested in two stages: first, a wafer test does a very brief functional check over all dice prior to singulation. The bad dice are marked with a paint dot and thrown away, the good dice are packaged. After packaging, testing can be more intensive and identify chips with different performance levels (binning) as well as defects that cause reliability issues (margining). This intensive testing cannot be done for COBs, so they would cause failure rate of PCBA to increase.
3. Epoxy blob doesn't have such good thermal performance as you can get with integrated heat slug packages.