All good points, thank you both for your responses! The control and ease of wound care are both good points (more so for fingertips than the palm of your hand -- palm wounds are just awful to bandage in my experience).

I guess I'm still hung up on two nitpicky practical things: the risk of infection, and the annoyance of bumping your cut on stuff. Major knee or arm scrapes are annoying, but nothing's worse to me than a finger cut brushing against the edge of my pocket or a pen I'm trying to hold.

The first one is unheard of in fiction (despite most of these settings being pre- or non-antibiotics ) and the second is probably a net positive in fiction as Mx. Silver said, since "I'm willing to casually inconvenience myself with this wound" usually makes someone more of a badass and never presents any of the logistics wrinkles that real life would encounter. So I understand why they do it, for the most part, even if it still doesn't feel like the most practical option.