Why are 2018 Retina MacBook Air function keys so big?

As someone who uses the escape key and function keys quite a bit, I certainly prefer them to the miniscule F keys you usually get on laptops. And they are still smaller than the regular keys, so I would hardly describe them as "unecessarily large".

 

Also much nicer than the Touch Bar. I prefer the size of the function keys on my Magic Keyboard. They're basically the same size as every other key.

 

I'll be honest, I never noticed this and have found them to be fine. I was in the camp of not minding the TouchBar, but I never really loved it and now I have an Air, I really don't miss it at all.