Yeah, it could have just been designers wanting to put in favicons for their own sake (which is not intrinsically bad, remember the dark ages before browser tab

Yeah, it could have just been designers wanting to put in favicons for their own sake (which is not intrinsically bad, remember the dark ages before browser tabs had favicons?) and product managers saying, well, the revenue looks good... New Theory of Software Evolution: Designers = random mutations Product Managers = fitness function