What a horrible rule that was. Conceptually it's fine, or even good, but in practice it leads to terrible things.

...and I do mean terrible things and blown up accounts. In reality, you have smaller retail traders holding on to underwater positions instead of closing them out, because they won't want to use one of the 5 weekly daytrade tokens allocated to them. Some of them ship money to unregulated offshore brokers. Some go to extremely leveraged 0DTE markets and weekly options and move to suboptimal strategies to partially work around PDT.

There are many situations when a prudent smaller trader may want to burn daytrades. Maybe instead of using 0DTE options for gambling, they can hedge their exposure for a Fed speaker and close the position after an hour, etc.

Obviously there are dangers with churning small accounts, but that doesn't stop traders who want to trade with higher frequency, and as soon as a new trader types "how do I get around PDT" into Google, they're already off to a very bad start in their journey.