I'm still a low hours PPL student so perhaps coming to this with a fresher pair of eyes than some.
In reality most basic aircraft - and certainly flight school planes - are working off designs that are decades old. In fact in the case of most trainer aircraft the planes themselves are decades old so inevitably the ergonomics are going to look dated - it's because they are!
The reality of it though is that they are highly functional, having key dials in the same relative position means that ingrained scan patterns aren't interrupted. And absolute precision on the instruments is often irrelevant -a glance at your ASI to make sure the needle is roughly at 65kts for landing is enough - if you are indicating at 63 or 67 doesn't really matter as long as attitude is right and a more major fluctuation in speed that would be relevant is easily spotted. I think one of my ground school books also said that analogue dials are faster to read than digital numbers because you don't need to actually "read" them. Lastly tilting the gauges might cause glare from the sun which could be dangerous, by having the instruments flat this isn't an issue.
On a bit of a tangent one of the first questions my FI asked me before my first flight with him was if I played a lot of flight sims and he was relieved when I said no - apparently those who go to a PPL from sims spend all of thier time fixated on the instruments and no time looking outside (which is kind of the point in VFR). They also have a tendency to chase the needle rather than letting the plane fly. Genuinely no offence intended to the OP but I really don't understand why people spend that long on sims or watching videos and don't just go and do the real thing