Rethinking cat behaviors

In my opinion, the behavior where tamed cats sit on chests, beds, and active furnaces without any player input is rather annoying, especially since you can’t open a chest if a cat is auto-sitting on it. 1.16 finally added the ability to make the cats stand up by double-right-clicking on them when they are doing this behavior. However, it still bugs me how often they do it (especially if you have multiple cats), and although you can stop it by putting a transparent block above all your chests, it seems kind of pointless to do that just so you can have a pet cat.

I would assume (though I could be wrong) that when this behavior was implemented all the way back in 1.2, it was to balance out the cats’ ability to scare away creepers (and as of 1.13, phantoms). I don’t think that inconveniencing players in this way is a good balance. A better solution would be to either (slightly) nerf the cat’s ability to scare away phantoms and creepers and remove the auto-sitting, or to introduce a new drawback to having cats around instead of them auto-sitting. My idea for a drawback is that cats would “rub” their heads on the corners of blocks, like how most real pet cats do to mark their scent. While rubbing, cats wouldn't move, but after they finish, they’d resume following you. This way, having an army of cats won’t make you creeper-proof, since the cats won’t always be right next to you, but they won’t get left behind (since auto-sitting cats don’t stand up unless told to).