I remember when they became standard way to select weapons, abilities and so on in the Xbox 360/PS3 generation and how modern and next-gen they felt. When you wanted to change equipment in older PS1 or PS2 games, typically you had to pause the game to dig around in an inventory to pick a new weapon, then exit back to the game and oh boy does it feel clunky when returning to those older games.
I assume the change was motivated partly by the dpad finally being completely supplanted by the left analog stick for movement so designers could come up with new uses for it
PC games had of course used the number keys as hotkeys since day 1 so the change was mostly a console thing
I'm more forgiving towards the hard pause to enter the inventory than I am the scrolling menu where you can't skip options. Pausing and selecting is my breather moment, time to look over my options and decide how to handle this. Unless it's a constant because you need X type for Y enemy, then it becomes annoying.
Actually, out of all the systems, I like how .hack//G.U handled weapon swaps in the second and third volumes. Equip up to 3 weapons, use a skill assigned to a weapon to hot-swap mid-battle. Made it feel really slick to chip an enemy into Break range, Rengeki to a clean kill and better weapon for the other 2 you're facing.
A lot of single player games pause the game anyway when open one but radial menus or other sorts of quick select screens are just overlays and don't take you out of the game. You typically just hold a button to open them and close them by letting go of said button
There's just much less friction and it doesn't feel like it interrupts the flow of the game