Yep, if you want to run a sustainable business you don't look to fire on all cylinders all the time, but that's the rub, almost no owners are looking to run a sustainable business anymore.

Most people either want hypergrowth idiocy or to be bought by the people doing hypergrowth idiocy.

Setting consistent expectations means you can plan, you can actually reasonably budget, you can have predictability in your business dealings - if you are trying to run a good business these are all real features instead of "puts out more code that might or might not make us money, but at least we were pulling all nighters and adding perceived meaning to our lives!"

AI has made this way worse - now the thinking is "well, the agent is doing all the work, why can't the engineers make sure it is running on all cylinders all the time, churning out useful code"