“Pro” usually means “more expensive, with more features”.
So the fact that features appear there first is more or less a tautology.
Also if it’s actual new tech, it often is most expensive to produce it early in its life. As it gets cheaper to make, it finds its way into cheaper cameras and the economies of scale eventually make it ubiquitous.
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Let’s try the opposite question, why do pros use “pro” cameras if they can get good results with cheaper cameras?
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Well, I use both. But the more sophisticated cameras make life and work more enjoyable because a lot of their features put less strain on the user the longer you use them.
For example: I can photograph action sports with a pocket camera that has half a second shutter delay. Been there, done that, just to proof the point to someone who said it can’t be done. But covering a full day sports event like that is going to fry your brain in calculating movement, timing and so on. A camera with less than 50ms delay is much easier on your your mental workload.
Having an AF that can just nail a situation in near darkness and you know it did is less stress. And so on, and so on.
A lot of fine-tuning for those features is in the menus. I usually work through every single item, set them, and then forget them. I don’t use settings banks, presets, or whatever. The camera just “is”.
So in usage my work-device D500 is very similar to my leisure-device Panasonic GF1 - set exposure, focus, press the button and darktable does the rest.
But exactly at this point there is a word for the more modern cameras: real-life usable dynamic range¹. The GF1 is lovely but only at base-ISO is the dynamic range with 7,2 stops kind of okay. Still better than film², but the D500 just blows it away with 10,7 stops. So now I am using my wife’s dormant lying GF7 which is almost as simple as the GF1 but gives me 9 stops to work with. Good enough for everything.
Oh, and my secondary camera on jobs is a Nikon D3500 because I just love its simplicity.
¹) I prefer and use the numbers from Photographic Dynamic Range versus ISO Setting because they are much more practical in daily usage than the very theoretical approach by DxOmark.
²) The word here is «usable». Film rolls off nicely into the lights. But modern - anything in the last 15 years except Canon - digital cameras roll off nicely into the shadows. It’s completely different, but digital has definitely more usable information that one can work with.
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Also as every software engineer will confirm:
It is much harder to remove complexity from a system than to add it.
If you want a simple camera, the new Leica Q3 might be for you.
Only €300 more will give you 2 buttons less on the new model compared to the older Q2. 
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Well, 4 years ago i was totally fed up with changing lenses, fiddling with camera options. As i don’t shoot birds or action i sold all foto stuff i had (had to add some more) and got myself a Q2. That’s the best spent money for photography i ever did. Don’t care about weather, small package, a perfect & very simple user interface, full manual control if i want to do so and just great quality of lens and sensor. Took me a while to get used to a fixed 28mm and rarely i miss a tele but overall - perfect. Simply don’t understand why other manufacturers (fuji is the exception) don’t do “keep it simple”
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I “graduated” from a Fuji X-S10 to an OM-1. Prior to the Fuji I had (and still have, though I passed it to my wife,) a Sony RX-10 IV.
Some of the Sony features remain quite a mystery to me - its high-speed video recording in particular but I no longer am involved in archery so have no use for it. The Sony menu system has/had a great reputation for being hard to use. The Fuji was a revelation, and selling it was only due to me wanting a weather-sealed camera and an overall reduction in system weight.
The Fuji wasn’t hard to use but the OM-1 is even easier, and I find that it’s a joy in this regard, but I need to still refer to the manual (6 months on). There are just so many features that learning them all at once isn’t straightforward. Here the camera helps a little: if I attempt something that other camera settings won’t allow the camera often helps me with a message. The Fuji would just grey-out the setting and I’d have to figure things out myself - usually the info was in the manual, which adds steps that my OM-1 made unnecessary.
I also think that anyone who can get a new camera and sit with a manual and actually read through it in one go has a far greater attention-span than I. I will from time to time take my camera and go through parts of the manual, but that’s it. I need the context of what a feature can be used for to give the manual true meaning.
Part of the fun of photography to me is learning that the camera can do something I wasn’t expecting but is immediately useful. I’m getting quite familiar with accessing the OM-1feature set.
So I guess to answer to the OP’s question is that a camera’s features aren’t much use or value if accessing them is incomprehensibly difficult or are arcane in their operation. Or both. But if your intended use doesn’t include accessing those features, then they will remain superfluous to needs and an unnecessary expense, albeit one that with today’s equipment will be difficult to avoid in all likelihood. (Though Canon seems to have quite a range of cameras with varying features.) But for sure, I enjoy the feature set of today’s cameras and place quite a high value on some of those features. IBIS is one that springs to mind, because my age sees my ability to hold the camera steady is diminishing though I find that with just minimal bracing the IBIS does a sterling job of delivering sharp images at astonishingly slow shutter speeds.
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I can relate, to a degree.
The other day, I wanted to use the pre-shot capture on my Fuji X-T3, where it saves images a full second before the shutter was tripped. But this only works (iirc) in electronic shutter mode, when the highest frame rate is selected. In the event, I didn’t remember that, so it didn’t work.
Then I wanted to use the sports finder, where the camera crops in a bit digitally. But this only works (iirc) in non-electronic shutter mode. Similar limitations are present for HSS flash, for example. I wish they would either:
- tell me what setting to change to activate the feature, or
- auto-set the settings when I activate the feature.
That said, these are very specialized circumstances. For most use cases, my cameras largely do what I want them to do. I especially like the Fuji’s “analog” dials. They have numbered settings and “A”, for auto. Usually, I keep all of them on A. But whenever I want to use a specific aperture, I turn the aperture dial. If I want a fast shutter speed, I turn the shutter speed dial. It’s very direct and tactile, which I like. This is fractionally more intuitive to me than switching from auto to aperture-priority Mode, and then selecting the aperture.
As for modern camera features, I am not needy. Autofocus has long been good enough for my applications (which includes kids and the occasional bird). Autofocus tracking sounds interesting in theory, but whenever I tried it, I really didn’t see what the fuss is all about, and go back to the good old single point. 24 MP and 12-stop raws are more than adequate for even the largest print sizes and deep crops. And as much as I’d like to play with IBIS, the number of shots I miss due to lack of stability is extremely low. I am quite satisfied with yesteryear’s cameras and don’t really see a pressing need for anything better.
In general, I try to think about camera gear on terms of capability: which shots was a not able to take on my last shoot, that a different camera would allow? This number has become ridiculously low in recent years, even with my relatively (!) modest gear.
…of course I’ll still buy something new eventually. I’ve just fought back a bout of GAS for a Nikon Z. But whatever I’ll buy when the time comes, it’ll be strictly for fun, not capability.
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The Nikkor Z 50mm f1.8 is magic. Just sayin
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It works with other frame rates too, but you do need CH + Electronic Shutter, but anything from 11 to 25fps(1.25x crop) works with preshot.
Indeed, this is unfortunate. The only way around it is to use the 25fps option whichs ends up cropping the same amount.
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The same reason bike racers use expensive, lightweight bikes, even though they could much faster than I can on my city bike with a hub gear and a child seat.
“Pro” photographers make a living from photography, and the cost of missing shots or having to do more work to obtain them is higher.
That said, many hobbyists use “pro” gear. It is not that super-expensive, there are much more expensive hobbies. Depends on what one likes.
And many professional photographers use “consumer” cameras — I know a portrait photographer who still uses an older Olympus PEN (one where you could attach a viewfinder). She says that it does the job and is much less intimidating to people than a full frame, much easier to make them “forget about the camera”.
The distinction between “pro” and “consumer” gear is not as clearcut as you might think, and it does not map to users they way marketing departments of camera companies would want us to believe.
Also, the problem with “pro” gear (full frame, matching set of fast lenses) is that it is frickin’ heavy and large. I recently saw Hasselblad marketing the X2D 100C Lightweight Field Kit as
In totality, the kit weighs only 1810g, making it effortless to carry during long shoots, hikes to hard-to-reach places
First I thought they were joking.
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And then you realised they were dead serious. 
If one compares it to some of the gear of yesteryear, 1.8kg is super light.
There is one factor a lot of people forget: the more complex, elaborate and unique a project is, the more you want to make sure to be able to finish it in a reasonable timeframe. And that means two cameras. Everywhere. That second camera does not have to be the same as the first, and with mixed media and B-roll it very often isn’t anymore, but in a classic setup you have everything exactly twice.
In analog times I had that FM2 stuffed away in my bag. Today I have the lightest and cheapest with me that uses the same lenses as my main camera. 20 years ago we could only dream of having something like a Nikon D3500 with the kitlens as our main camera available. Progression has been awesome.
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This! 
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That is basically how i treated all my Fuji X cameras. it can be weeks that i do not change the lens on the camera. (most of the time the 56mm is on it) and the i just set it to Aperture priority mode. pick my ISO and aperture and start shooting. and i focus on that. instead of thinking “which of the thousand other features could I use now?” For months I was just shooting in Acros mode. which can be a very refreshing look on photography.
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I’m more of a 40mm kind of guy, but the retro version of the Z 40 actually looks very appealing and compact, too. I wish the 24-120 was a bit smaller, more on line with the 24-200.
Oh well, for the moment my Fuji gear is serving me well, especially the 16-80, 23 f/1.4, and 70-300. I wish they had a 27 f/1.4. …
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And yet Miroslav Tichý’s cameras were made from cardboard tubes, bottle caps, and rubber bands.
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Maybe this ?? Maybe not as good as a fuji…
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if you go down that path … 75/1.2 
juuuuuuuuuuust saying
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I have a lot of cameras but my X100F sees the most use, only thing I’d like to add to it is weather sealing. It’s really simple. I don’t make Leica money. 
Ok, maybe if I quit buying old junk of the internet.
I think manufacturers are just reading the market. Photographer isn’t a stand alone job anymore. Outside of the high end art world you’re a social media specialist, video producer and stills taker if you’re doing this for income. Most everyone I know in the pro field is doing a bit of all of these days to varying degrees of depth. Hobbyists often like to dabble in video and what not too. The more complicated demands of what it means to be a photographer these days has transferred to the gear. You see it in lighting too, most new stuff out there is LED for stills and video. There are still nice strobes but they’ve become a niche of a niche. LED has shortcomings as it’s a discrete spectrum and can cause odd color problems even on higher end models and I still prefer strobe for still photos.
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Well maybe they will be like using your smartphone soon… if any of the speculation here is true. I feel like there has already been one or two cameras that sort of did this but maybe Sony might make the jump in a more serious way to allow for some improvements as noted in this video… there are certainly limitations with the current setup used in “modern” camera’s…
