That's not the case at all. Some elements of the original ARM ISA were carried over (such as the barrel shifter - they were an influence from VLIW architectures, and a common enough task to justify their inclusion), but many of the ergonomic elements were ditched. It was significantly more parsimonious, but some elements, such as having the flags in the PC/R15 and conditional execution for all instructions were later scrapped for various reasons.
Not 100% sure what you're pushing back against here. It was certainly a pragmatic implementation of RISC when compared to other designs of the era which were much more 'pure.
I'm not pushing back against anything. The ARM ISA family has two distinct phases. I'm just stating that the original ISA and the current ISA are two distinct beasts. Both are pragmatic in their own way, but the motivations between how that pragmatism is applied are quite different.
