Sometimes the real reason is uncomfortable and they don't want to say it out loud. Like, "the CEO is an idiot, and wants it this way for stupid reasons"
Though maybe "the CEO doesn't understand how Google calendar works, so he thinks putting our time off in a shared spreadsheet is easier" would satisfy?
At my job a lot of stupid things come out of "someone high ranking doesn't understand computers" or "they don't benefit from fixing this, so it's easier for them to leave it stupid"
My job is populated by dinosaurs that only recently adopted git for version control. They had some rules and procedures that made a kind of sense when deployment meant "I'll scp the files to the prod server", but don't add value anymore.
Some people had a rule where after "deploy" they would SSH into prod and check the md5 hash of the files and compare them to their local copy. You don't have to do that.
They also wanted to only allow one person to work on a file at the same time because "you can overwrite their changes". Git handles that fine (unless you really fuck up the merge conflict, admittedly)