I use mine in meetings and often end up in a situation where I need to remove and charge the one which is about to go flat for a few minutes.

I need to know individual levels to do that

I often use just one of them, and then I want to know that one‘s battery.

If you're only using one, it seems fine to have only one battery level report. I don't see the problem

No, in that case they'd want both to be reported separately so they could use the AirPod with the higher charge.

whichever one you're using will be reporting its battery level. if you want to know the other one, swap them around.