I can't imagine people rely on being able to eject a network card or whatever those other devices are in my screenshot, they are not hotplug removable in real physical scenarios so why would that ever be needed?
You're incorrect, you just may not have thought it through. Even in a physical host scenario, devices such as network connections and storage are routinely hooked up to physical hosts -- just look at any USB thumb drive, USB ethernet dongle, Thunderbolt accessories, etc. It may be true that you cannot hot detach your mainboard's onboard ethernet because it is soldered on, but certainly the capability to create hot plug devices exists -- see for ex.
Ethernet Adapters and Devices User Guide
Sep 3, 2020 — Most Intel® Ethernet Server Adapters are enabled for use in selected servers equipped with Hot Plug support.
Hot adding and removal of disks, network, memory, and even CPU's is quite possible and often used to adjust the configuration of virtual machines. If you can picture the need to add any of these resources to a virtual machine while it is shut down, the question then becomes "and why do you need to shut it down for that to be possible?"
Since the virtIO devices are inherently a figment of the server's imagination, there's no reason that they cannot be hot added or removed. There may be administrative reasons you want these to remain available, so one option would be to disable Windows hot removal. I don't have a link handy since I haven't looked at this in many years.
