Ideally, yes, a deadline is set for a specific business reason. But I cannot count the number of times a deadline has been set for a project that is just utter

Ideally, yes, a deadline is set for a specific business reason. But I cannot count the number of times a deadline has been set for a project that is just utterly arbitrary, proven by the project releasing successfully on the deadline and then being immediately abandoned and forgotten about. Feature launches without marketing, website redesigns without fanfare, architecture refactoring that sits on the shelf for a month before actually being deployed. Not that I'm claiming that all executive decisions are clueless, most people are just trying to do a good job with limited information, and mistakes happen. But you run into enough executives without respect that runs in the other direction, and you start to question all deadlines. (Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In a healthy environment, questioning the feasibility of a deadline can lead to appropriate descoping of overreaching features, reduction of risk, etc. But the situations that lead to this kind of suspicion are rarely healthy to begin with.)