> As a user of KiCAD, I have not found any need for it to automatically move cursors
Well, the first thing you do with KiCAD is scrolling to zoom in and out, and KiCAD scroll works in a way to jump cursor to the center, so you basically can pan and scroll at the same time. That's default behaviour unless you changed it in the settings, and, obviously, it needs to warp cursor to the center of the window.
The way pan-and-scroll works in every other CAD program has been that zooming with the cursor off-center is a panning zoom (zoom centering on the cursor position), without the cursor warping anywhere, so that seems like a reasonable behavior. I do see that the described behaviour can be convenient, but definitely not a deal-breaker in the space.
Maybe I changed the config, can't remember and I must admit that it's been a little while since I had to fire it up.
You cannot get the level of control out of keyboard shortcuts that you can with fine grained mouse movements. It'd be like trying to play a videogame while controlling camera movement with a controller DPAD/arrow keys.
Why would introducing a mouse interface necessitate pointer warping? There are several millions/billions of apps which utilize mouse and doesn’t need pointer warping.
So the second time, why is it needed in this case, and why it cannot be solved other ways?
Well, the first thing you do with KiCAD is scrolling to zoom in and out, and KiCAD scroll works in a way to jump cursor to the center, so you basically can pan and scroll at the same time. That's default behaviour unless you changed it in the settings, and, obviously, it needs to warp cursor to the center of the window.