It's because leadership is a heady cocktail of stupid and selfish.
I really want to stress stupid. That means they draw bad conclusions from facts.
Sometimes selfish is a factor. They have an obscure reason like "my share value goes up because we get a kickback from the city for staffing an office here". They don't care if it's bad for everyone else or the company long term. They'll get their money and then leave.
There's also the class of comments that explain strange business decisions.
# Product guy said to return January 1st if the user doesn't have a birthday on recordKind of arbitrary but someone with decision making power decreed it.