Speculatively loading data across a protection boundary which is what happens in Meltdown can be argued to be incompetence or sneakiness. It certainly helps wit

Speculatively loading data across a protection boundary which is what happens in Meltdown can be argued to be incompetence or sneakiness. It certainly helps with benchmarks. Moreover it would be hard to say "everyone is doing it" because it seems so far besides the latest ARM processors, most of the other CPU architectures don't do it.