They would much rather confidently repeat a date that is totally unfounded rubbish which will have to be rolled back later, because then they can blame the engineering team for not delivering to their estimate.
In Australia, an SDE + overhead costs say $1500 / work day, so 4 engineers for a month is about $100k. The money has to be allocated from budgets and planned for etc. Dev effort affects the financial viability and competitiveness of projects.
I feel like many employees have a kind of blind spot around this? Like for most other situations, money is a thing to be thought about and carefully accounted for, BUT in the specific case where it's their own days of effort, those don't feel like money.
Also, the software itself presumably has some impact or outcome and quite often dates can matter for that. Especially if there are external commitments.
But when you get paid less than half that it doesn’t feel like a problem to worry about. At 300/day of take-home pay, one more day here or there really isn’t going to make a difference.