I don’t think white noise has anything to do with the topic. Some people get bored doing chores and therefore watch a movie or listen to a podcast in the background.
It has nothing to do with optimizing performance of a task. Doing the laundry for your family for the 10,000th time is a chore, not a task that is optimized.
This is a pretty common thing to do, so I’m not sure why this is so confusing.