That's an apt observation!

I struggled with traps a lot in the past, both as GM and as player, because the "Oops, your forgot to say..." you describe just never felt like an interesting or satisfying outcome, and handling traps speculatively dragged the pace down and distracted a bit from the core of what's fun for my groups.

What opened my eyes was Chris McDowall (of Into the Odd & Electric Bastionland), saying that how one reacts to obvious danger, so to paraphrase: taking decisions on known and open ended problems, is one core element of RPG gameplay. You cannot make useful decisions, if you are missing too much info, otherwise it starts becoming gambling. And this really turned my mind around on using traps. I generally try to follow these recommendations from old-school or old-school adjacent games:

• Characters generally see signs of traps, if they are not running, distracted, etc. So for example: obvious holes in the wall, prior unlucky adventurer's remains with and obvious appropriate wound, etc.
• Taken from old-school DnD: traps do not trigger reliably, but only on a 33% or 50% chance.
• Traps mostly cannot be disarmed by character skill alone, but rather the players should figure a way around it.

And in my experience, this transformed the "Oops, Take 2d6 damage!" into a fun bit of "How do we best get through this hall of spears, without getting skewered?" problem solving.