I think it's because cyclic initiative and the format of the MM causes people to start thinking in board game terms. They're no longer thinking, "Oh, this is an ogre who was in his home with his ogre buddies eating a rotten cow five seconds ago and is now looking at a bunch of heavily-armed ugly humans who just kicked down his door." They're thinking, "It's my turn to Attack/Dash/Disengage/etc."
The kicker is that I think it's really quite difficult to think in combat turns and also think in roleplaying terms. It's natural to say, "Oh, this ogre grimaces at his ogre buddy and then they each pick up one end of the table and hurl it at the PCs," but because that quite-natural interaction is complicated when you translate it into discretized combat turns ("I grimace at the other ogre and Ready an action to hurl the table as soon as he does likewise"?), it is no longer a natural thing to do if combat turns are your basic unit of interaction. And I think that can easily bleed over even into actions which could be expressed as a discrete action, like "I grimace at my buddy and then throw a cow head at the humans" because combat turns bias you towards thinking of each character/monster in isolation, with everyone else being frozen in time until your "turn" is over. It's no longer natural to grimace at your buddy unless he can roll his eyes appreciatively or grimace back.
It takes a fair amount of mental sophistication for a player or DM to translate "take combat turns separately" back into "all of this stuff is actually happening at the same time, and the isolation is just a formality, and you guys are grimacing and interacting with each other throughout." Those who haven't fully internalized that sophistication will tend to steer themselves into action declarations which make sense in discretized combat turns, especially the actions that are designed to be taken during combat turns like Attack/Dash/Disengage/etc. "It's my turn" doesn't mean "it's my turn to do anything," it means "it's my turn to choose from a list of things that can be done in a single combat turn." When was the last time you saw someone playing with cyclic initiative declare an action that would take more than one combat turn to resolve? "I'm picking the lock." "I'm still picking the lock."
Coming from AD&D, cyclic initiative is the worst thing about 5E, and the thing I'm gladdest that I fixed.
This is an interesting post. I don't use initiative as well, for slightly different reasons, but it's really about ensuring the rules don't interfere with, or worse, control the world. To me, the rules should enable the DM to adjudicate the action, combat or otherwise, not dictate it.
From a combat perspective, the evolution that started with 2.5e into 4e was to be "more realistic" such as adding flanking, but ultimately moved it to a less realistic approach and into a game mentality. Initially we loved it. I can't stand it now. 4e went farther with it's requirement to add lots of "unique" abilities to each creature with "marks" and "auras" and "bloodied actions" that had no tie to the fiction or the world.
While play testing DnD Next, and continuing to tweak it in 5e, I've started looking at things like football or boxing when determining how well the combat system is modeling reality. In the cyclic initiative system, a quarterback that wins initiative can be 60' down the field before anybody else gets to move. Sure he might have had to fend off an opportunity attack or two, but still.
Another factor for me is that I still think in terms of AD&D 1 minute rounds. So your example with the ogres is just a matter of the two of them getting their act together to throw the table. The evolution (which I see emphasized in online play) is that each die roll is a single swing of the sword. "You rush up to the ogre and with a mighty swing of the sword you strike." Combat isn't "I swing, then you swing, then I swing."
Added to this problem is that most combats using the 5e rules are over in a matter of seconds. I'm not sure a RAW 5e combat we ran ever lasted a minute. I'm now play testing some additional rules, which add resistance to certain attacks due to armor, strengthens large or larger creatures, and other things that make life more difficult. The problem is that I don't want it to just extend the number of die rolls. I'm more interested in it changing the tactics to something more "realistic."
Another factor is that of leveling up and the abilities of the characters, particularly how that relates to the world around them. For example, in the example of the ogre, one blow from it would kill 90% of the people of the world. It's very dangerous. But a group of adventurers, not so much. My campaigns gain levels much more slowly, and combined with tweaking the monsters a bit, makes them much more challenging.
Ultimately, I prefer the game to present the characters as people living in a "real" world. Low level characters should fear ogres. And bears for that matter. To that end, a single shot from an ogre (or bear) should be debilitating to 1st, 2nd, or even 3rd level characters. Ogres should be aggressive, charging and attacking immediately, and instilling fear. Sure, they may be dispatched relatively quickly if there are several characters, but in that moment of the attack, they should fear for their lives. I haven't changed hit points much, but I've added injuries, and they are much more difficult to heal, and have consequences that last days. That makes direct melee combat against an ogre much worse. Sure, you'll probably kill it, but at least one of your party will probably be suffering from at least 1 level on the exhaustion track for the next few days.
In the end, it all kind of goes back to the current design of the game, which I don't really fault. For the majority of players (who are not the people likely to discuss this sort of stuff here), they are looking for a more "video game" or "board game" experience where they'll fight stuff, get treasure, and gain levels and abilities. For a mass market game, that's really the way to go. The beauty of 5e is that it is also designed in a way that makes it easy to modify and tweak to your liking. Particularly if you want to bring it more in line with any earlier edition other than 4e. I don't really see how you could turn this ruleset into 4e, but then I don't think you could easily utilize material from OD&D through 3.5e in 4e either. It was just too different of a ruleset.
