alt Hacker NewsThe 32-bit ARM architecture included a barrel shifter as part of its basic design, as in every instruction had a shift field.
If a CPU built in 1985 with a grand total of 26 000 transistors could afford it, I am pretty sure that anything built in this century could afford it too.
26k is a lot of transistors for an embedded MCU.
You'd be excluding many small CPUs which exist within other chips running very specialized code.
As profiles mandate these instructions anyway, there's no good reason to complicate the most basic RISC-V possible.
RISC-V is the ISA for everything, from the smallest such CPUs to supercomputers.