Turns out the switch controls power to the whole circuit, not just the light, so if you want the fan on you have to flip the switch, turn it on with the remote then use the remote to turn off the light, which isn’t great in summer and you want to turn the fan on during the night (we had the same ones in the place we rented, so we’re familiar with them).
As an aside - we do have something that I would put in this category of poor design, our fans. We put fans in each of our bedrooms and they are a broken user experience. There’s a switch on the wall and it’ll turn on the light in the fan, and we have a remote to turn the fan on/adjust speed. Then if you turn off the switch the light goes off… and so does the fan 😒. Turns out the switch controls power to the whole circuit, not just the light, so if you want the fan on you have to flip the switch, turn it on with the remote then use the remote to turn off the light, which isn’t great in summer and you want to turn the fan on during the night (we had the same ones in the place we rented, so we’re familiar with them). I’ll talk about solving that in a future post.