It does have standing; section 6.2 of RFC 2418 (BCP 25). They can be listed on the charter page. But I agree it's little used.
Creating a culture of grooming secretaries to become WG chairs will help, in my opinion, to deal with the chair supply problem and will allow evaluation of possible chairs ahead of time, plus presuambly increase the motivation of the secretary to perform above expectation.
Again, similar arrangements seem very common in the various technical subgroupings of major societies (ACM Sigcomm, IEEE ComSoc technical committees).
I suspect that one could even argue that there's a need for an area secretary/manager (or two), with explicit process acceleration responsibilities, rather than technical review.
I'm sure others will correct me here, but I believe that the IEEE 802.* organizations have similar arrangements. A random example includes http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/19/
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