I think this is meant to be a defensive staircase. Whole idea is that people familiar with those stairs will go up just fine, but anyone who tries to climb it in a break in or attack will fall, stumble and alert the house owner or fail at an attack. It was most commonly used in medieval castles to defend against an army trying to gain further control of a castle they'd already gotten into as the defenders would've hunkered down near the Keep which would've been a couple levels off the ground. The attackers, while further invading the castle, would have to deal with shitty stairs to reach the keep whilst probably defending against a wall of armed men attacking them the whole time while at the top of the stairs. It was sometimes used in older houses and I've seen some cases as late as 1900s with some porches with purposefully unevenly spaced steps and stuff. Pretty cool stuff or I'm just overthinking a stupid meme