Not a ridiculous question. It's actually a really smart one, and one that not enough partisan commentators are thinking through. There's a few things going on here.
1. We need to separate individuals from companies. Not all that many individuals have >$250K in a single bank account. LOTS of companies do. You don't need to be a particularly large company to need to have access to $1M+ for regular operations, e.g. payroll and supplies from vendors. Those small companies might not have particularly sophisticated finance or treasury folks on staff.
2. There are an increasing number of products that automate spreading deposits around. They're called sweep accounts/sweep networks. So that's getting more common. Mercury Bank seems to be stepping up in a big way, at least for tech startups.
3. Setting aside everything else, for anyone concerned about bank failure, the most obvious solution is to put your money into the biggest/most stable banks. So absent government intervention, everyone's going to go to Chase, Citi, etc. This would decimate smaller and regional banks. You can form your own opinion on whether or not that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a true thing. I can't wait to see published data on the inflows into the top 4 banks in the US from this last few days. To your question - the federal government _does_ want to encourage the survival of small banks, for various reasons - that seems to be policy right now.
4. Pre-FDIC, banks failed constantly and depositors lost money constantly. As I understand it, it's been 90+ years since any depositor actually lost money in a US bank failure. imho, this is a good thing. For people who are thinking that the fed's intervention on SVIB is a radical departure from the norm - it's really not. It's at worst a minor evolution of fundamental principles that have been in place for almost a century. Principles like - depositors should be protected as much as possible, and risk should be placed on the banks, not the US taxpayers. Which is exactly what's happening here.
5. One of the things that makes this feel like such a story is that the FDIC is _so bloody good_ at dealing with bank failures and protecting depositors that the notion that maybe they wouldn't be protected shocked a lot of people into some pretty extreme points of view. It caused a news cycle to a level I don't recall in my 40ish years on this planet. Even WaMu's much larger failure 15 years ago didn't cause this much consternation.
I won't even get into the narrative that this is a bailout for the rich, since you didn't put it in your question, except to say that that's such a ridiculously false claim on its face that it's annoying how much airtime it's getting.