How come we have all been conned into these switchmode things? - by
their very nature, without a lot of effort, they are noise generators.
Their cheap to make, thats their only advantage - everything else is
part of the spin cycle.

Other advantages include much better power efficiency and much lower weight.

It's not particularly difficult to make a switcher with very good (meaning
very little) noise output, but relatively few applications call for it, and
given how incredibly competitive the power supply arena is, it's not
surprising that a lot of companies drop a few components to reduce their costs
at the expense of noise.