As someone living in the netherlands, primary use is for decoupling risk. Look at the pedestrian side, they only cross a single lane where they have to look in a single direction. This makes pedestrian behaviour so obvious that its hard to miss someone looking straight at you while you're crossing. Same with car behaviour, no matter where the car is, the nose is pointing straight at you before crossing the conflict zone. The line of communication you have before a potential accident is insanely useful. It does not matter wether a stop sign or right of way was there if you're dead.

The "buffer" reduces decision complexity even more because people treat them like train blocks. The only annoyance I have is when people actually break-and-check at these points even though its better to roll the car slowly trough to save the people right behind from brake checking entire queues.