^H, ^J, ^K, and ^L _had_ meaning and that meaning is why hjkl do what they do. Their location on the homerow of a number of layouts is an accident. And they are not very useful in practice anyway.
"Remapping" the whole keyboard around them is IMO a silly idea.
"hjkl are arrow keys" because the arrows are printed on them and the arrows are printed on hjkl because pressing ^H, ^J, ^K, and ^L is what moved the cursor on the screen of the ADM-3A.
You would have to ask to the engineers at Lear Siegler who made that decision many decades ago.
That choice and the subsequent decision to print the arrows on the corresponding keys of a single model of their product line are why we got hjkl for cursor movement in Vi first… and now seemingly everywhere.
On the ADM-3A, moving the cursor on the screen was done by pressing ^H, ^J, ^K, ^L. The convention had been established by no-one-knows-who at Lear Siegler even before that specific terminal model came out.
"Remapping" the whole keyboard around them is IMO a silly idea.