Comment by JdeBP

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. (-: