I'm always curious to see what he's been up to!
Without reflecting much at all or trawling through various resources, Mike Zamansky, Sacha Chu, Mickey Peterson, etc etc. Not to mention all the maintainers, Eli Zaretskii, Lars Ingebrigsten, and however many others I don't know about, loads probably.
Oh wow does this one make me feel stupid. I've spent eons doing a C-x o C-x o C-x o... dance every time there's some bugging-out minibuffer prompt. It *never once* occurred to me to reflect on that as a "I'm doing it wrong!" issue.
Myself, I also haven't thought about fixing `C-g`. I ended up settling on a compromise solution - I have `winum` package configured so that pressing `M-0` focuses minibuffer, if open, so closing defocused minibuffer is just `M-0 C-g` for me. The keys `M-1` through `M-9` focus the windows 1 through 9, as usual.
I use a config similar to this explicit one with sparse keymap: https://github.com/deb0ch/emacs-winum?tab=readme-ov-file#key...
As long as `winum-auto-assign-0-to-minibuffer` user option is `t`, which it is by default, `M-0` does what I described above.
Having a single key to "focus minibuffer" is also useful with recursive minibuffers, on which I rely increasingly often.