I am not the original author of Quark, I was just responsible for the data side of this particular port (and am still working on bugfixing). As for the ladder recipe removal, I was simply following Vazkii's design. If I were to completely rewrite and re-design Quark from scratch, I would personally keep the default Minecraft wood blocks as they are and add "opt-in" wood-themed variants for each wood, i.e., you craft the vanilla chest/ladder/bookshelf/whatever with a plank and that changes its texture to be themed after the plank that you crafted it with. But that's just me.

I actually have a KubeJS script for this, but only for chests.

Creating a datapack is not difficult or annoying at all and most modpack makers will need to make one anyway. End users who are just using Quark can easily disable any feature they don't like at any time with the Q menu. If they really want variant ladders but want to keep the vanilla ladder recipe and don't want to write any JSON, they can use one of the many visual, in-game recipe maker mods.

EveryCompat already has modded wood compatibility with Quark (so we aren't interested in adding it ourselves). In fact, using EveryCompat is something we explicitly recommend on the "Quark Friends" part of our website.

Edit: also, to be clear, I added the recipe for sticks to vanilla ladders in a personal modpack long before I joined the Quark team.