I'm not sure that I agree this is a good enough reason to break the reaction rules in a fairly fundamental way.
Reactions were a big topic of discussion of how to do them. They're a topic that illustrates very well that sometimes you have to target the feelings that the rules are trying to introduce in the player, instead of trying to follow the rules letter by letter. So what we see is that 5th Edition D&D is an amazing tabletop social exprience and one way they create the excitement of action is that they push most of the decisions that players can do that cost them some resource or go on cooldown, they push those decisions as close as possible to the very last moment when they can be done.
So, for example, something like battlemaster maneuvers, the fighter maneuvers, their wording would say 'when you attack some creature, and only if you hit you can decide that your attack was actually a pushing attack all along'. This works for the player because when combat starts action is kind of in this slow motion phase and you create it in your head and it's very easy to say 'oh yeah, this was a menacing attack all along, but I came up with it after starting the attack'. But in the player's head it still works because it's all in your imagination. It's all looking cool and looks like an action game.
But then, when you have an actual 3D world that you just look at and it's there, we still want to keep the pushing attack or menacing attack visually distinct from all other attacks, and we don't want to pause all of the action and give you a pop-up 'Would you like to use menacing attack: Yes or no?' Because while it's correct by the rules, the actual physical experience the player gets is that it's not a quick reaction that they had in the middle of combat. Instead it's like a drudger decision where you have to read a bunch of text and stare at UI instead of seeing action take place in a real enviroment.
And so we were thinking how to keep the depth behind reactions and the tactical opportunities that they give you, while keeping the action flowing. And keepign the action close to the picture you have in your head when you're playing at tabletop. And our current idea is to let the player on their turn say which reactions they want trigger and which they don't. So a wizard would disable their attack of opportunity because it's probably not going to do a lot of damage, but they're going to enable some spells that they have. Battlemaster will enable reposte and things like that. And you can decide 'do I want to enable it? Do I want to spend resources on this or not?'
We are also looking into how we could give players even more control over when exactly this happens, but we don't really want to go into telling the player 'oh, just script your own visual language'. It's probably going to be overkill, so we're still figuring out that part.
