Not excusing the behaviour but I’d bet it’s the amount of traffic people often sit through everyday along with the overall pace of life feeling faster.
I’m lucky to work weird hours where traffic is almost zero, but personally, sitting in hours of traffic everyday to and from work would make me want to pull my hair out.
Sounds like it’s just another tool in a coding arsenal! As long as you take care to verify things like you did, I can’t see why it’d be a bad idea. It’s when you blindly trust that things go wrong.