It's because POKE in C64 felt to me like an excuse not to implement the actual command, "we give up, here's how you interact directly with the hardware". It feels the wrong level of abstraction. I now understand why they went this route (a combination of a poor licensing deal and the need to keep the BASIC implementation small enough to fit in memory), but it still left a bad taste.
And I'm speaking as 10-year old me, who didn't yet understand programming languages: Commodore BASIC felt incomplete.
And I'm speaking as 10-year old me, who didn't yet understand programming languages: Commodore BASIC felt incomplete.