Comment by meatmanek

It's folk wisdom, generated by a long line of people who did not have proper dæmon management despite such tooling having been available since the 1990s. Any sort of service management, from running things once at bootstrap to having a long-running service, becomes hammered into the shape of a cron job.

There are loads of people over the years who have reached for cron instead of reaching for proper general-purpose dæmon management (SRC, SMF, daemontools, runit, daemontools-encore, perp, s6, ...). It is on Stack Exchange answers and in people's personal "How I did this" articles on WWW sites. (Although the idea goes back to the Usenet era.) It became one of those practices perpetuated because other people did it.

The next step is always discovering that cron's error handling and logging are aimed at an era when the system operator sat in the console room, and received "You have new mail" notifications at the console shell prompt.

And the step after that is (re-)discovering that the anacron approach does not fully cut the mustard. (-:

Single scripts are easier coded and can be more loosely, as you don't have to look out for sneaky memory-leaks and other problems which might emerge in long-running tasks. There is also no need to build and maintain a bespoke framework for managing your multiple jobs. This avoids mental debt for the devs. If you have many jobs, from multiple devs, it's the more pragmatic solution.

Back in the day, the reason I had 1-minute cron jobs (with flock of course) was because "what if the bespoke daemon gets killed somehow?" We also used screen/tmux a lot, but only for stuff that could afford to wait until somebody poked it (often, because if it repeatedly crashed the cause was likely novel and would need investigation).

Systemd has been a game-changer for small-scale deployments.