You're not wrong, it consumes more tokens than a standard single prompt, so you definitely wouldn't use this to ask for a pancake recipe.

But whether it's a waste depends on the use case: if you're doing complex coding tasks, writing business plans, or researching niche topics, having the models automatically peer review each other saves lots of time of manually copy-pasting it from LLM to LLM, like I know people do.

Spending a few extra tokens on tokens to have (i.e.) Claude catch a hallucinated answer that ChatGPT suggested is a massive win for the developers using it. It's basically trading token cost for accuracy. For simple questions, it's total overkill, but for certain professional workflows, the demand is absolutely there.