I wonder if part of it is some people hacking emacs and going through a update-save-restart cycle instead of just evaluating their change in place. Then again

I wonder if part of it is some people hacking emacs and going through a update-save-restart cycle instead of just evaluating their change in place. Then again it may be the case that part of the cycle is seeing if the package management system of your custom distro (be it spacemacs, doom, or whatever) picks up and configures the new packages correctly.