The original motivation was for doing Chinese character stroke quizzes in Hanzi Writer [https://chanind.github.io/hanzi-writer]. Beyond that I'm not too sure, but hopefully it's useful for somebody :)

It can be used to detect patterns in signal data. For example to detect patterns like Cups/Handle [1] patterns in stock data.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cupandhandle.asp