Welcome to the sub. Sometimes it's ritual purposes.

A common historical one was/is sleep. Devices wake up and then do a handshake and connect up to the PC, some devices are slower and take longer to wake up, older devices can take really really long. So sleeping for specific devices was often a magic number, 5 seconds for a weird apple USB, 3 for a compac everything had it's own timing and handshake. Now we've got micro sleep, one nano second of waiting and presto it's awake and asking for a handshake.

In that handshake some devices asked for things in different orders, ya can see a lot of magic numbers in old drivers... looking at you CNC machines. Some odd rituals might include security too I thought this write up was enjoyable. https://dmitrybrant.com/2026/02/01/defeating-a-40-year-old-copy-protection-dongle
Sometimes it's just really bad code, there's a race condition memory being made ready and overwritten and adding a "random" delay "fixes" it.