There's a reason for the continued popularity for the piano in western music pedagogy (for the classical/literate tradition at least). The keyboard provides an ordered mapping of the musical scale into physical space, which makes it a lot more intuitive than most other instruments. The keyboard is also supply its own accompaniment, which makes its repertory somewhat independent, and also makes playing arrangements from ensemble and orchestral possible. This means that you can acquire a knowledge of a very large amounts of music first hand, as no doubt many amateurs did before the advent of recording.
For much of the same reason the piano was absolutely indispensable to the composers, as Charles Rosen observed in the first chapter of his Piano Notes:
>The utility of the piano for composing was its neutral and uniform tone color: in theory (although not in reality) the tone quality of the bass is the same as the treble. In any case, the change in tone color over the whole range of the piano is, or should be, gradual and continuous (there are breaks, of course, when the notes go from one string in the bass to two and then to three in the treble). The monochrome piano might be used therefore just for its arrangements of pitches, and the quality of the sound could-absurdly in many cases-be considered secondary.
>Keyboard instruments are the only ones able to realize and control the entire texture of Western polyphonic music.
Of course, the question then becomes, why has the piano held on as a mark of bourgeoisie pretensions when the prestige of the classical tradition has ran aground in the 20th century, and pretty much collapsed in the 21st. The rich and powerful in the west today do not, as a rule, promote their love of classical music nowadays as a status symbol. Elon Musk dated Grimes, presumably at least partially enamored by her reputation as a musician; he did not date a violin virtuoso or a operatic soprano, maybe because he has no emotional connection or particular interest for that type of music. Richard Taruskin has shown that the last US president who at least pretended to a taste in classical music was Nixon, and the electorate certainly did not notice the absence ever since, although there have been notably musical presidents like Clinton. It seems convenient to at least pretend that classical music still enjoys some of its prestige purely for the purposes of using it as a whipping boy and distract the snobbery between genres which has since morphed into snobbery inside each genre. I will be very surprised if someone asserts that classical music forms part of the culture of the elites today. How much does an orchestral musician make? How much is a ticket to a Paul McCartney concert?