It's a way to have specialty shower heads/accessories without having the plumbing in the wall. shower panel system

Each to his own but all that just to have a "rain shower head" that looks like my vacuum cleaner accessory for getting between the couch cushions :-).

Perhaps there are ones that don't seem so visually discordant.

They don't even sell anything like that in CA, because you can only have one function on at a time here, which defeats the whole point of a multi spray system!

I remember seeing a lot more of these about 15 years ago, before they got serious with water conservation/restriction in plumbing fixtures.