Color temperature is a property of the light that illuminated the subject (I looked that up). Once the image is captured by a particular sensor, the lightās color temperature is expressed as the ratios of the red, green and blue channels in the depiction of the color white (this is my conclusion, anyone feel free to correct me). So, the problem becomes aligning the individual channels so they make white do this: R=G=B.
In the olden days (my grandkids have told me anything earlier than 2008 are the olden days), color film emulsions were crafted to respond to the color temperature of light to make white R=G=B. Digital cameras have both that and the green bias of the CFA to worry, and the multipliers in the metadata correct for both.
So, bear-of-little-brain here thinks that messing with white balance using the channel multipliers directly makes more intuitive sense than using a color temperature slider to produce the multipliers. A color temperature slider on the camera, used to change the sensor response based on the actual light on the scene at the time of capture, would make more sense to me but itās probably simpler to just hard-code the camera to one response and fiddle with the multipliers after the fact.
As always, FWIWā¦