This is partly (or perhaps even rather significantly) due to the relatively new (say, 20-30 years) distributed aspects of music production.
In the 1970s, you began to see the emergence of the drummer "playing to the click" and the main motivation behind this was that some number of the rest of the performers were not in the room and/or not recording at the same time as the drummer. If you let the drummer just do their human thing, the timing will wander a bit in ways that are hard to follow and respond to if you were not in the room. So producers and engineers began to use click tracks to ensure that now matter when/where the differ performers actually recorded their work, everyone would be locked together.
If you record all together in a single space at a single time, you generally don't need this (unless the musicians are not very good and the drummer still wanders a lot).
So it's a phenomenon that didn't begin with DAWs and computers - that technology just took the overall approach even further.
In the 1970s, you began to see the emergence of the drummer "playing to the click" and the main motivation behind this was that some number of the rest of the performers were not in the room and/or not recording at the same time as the drummer. If you let the drummer just do their human thing, the timing will wander a bit in ways that are hard to follow and respond to if you were not in the room. So producers and engineers began to use click tracks to ensure that now matter when/where the differ performers actually recorded their work, everyone would be locked together.
If you record all together in a single space at a single time, you generally don't need this (unless the musicians are not very good and the drummer still wanders a lot).
So it's a phenomenon that didn't begin with DAWs and computers - that technology just took the overall approach even further.