For example, my lab studies the electrical activity of brain cells. A neuron normally sits at -70 mV relative to the extracellular space. When it fires, it can briefly cross 0 mV (though it probably won’t reach +70 mV) and sometimes you might want to show that complete spike. Other times, subthreshold changes in the cells’ activity are more important to a hypothesis, and then you’ll zoom in on a smaller range (maybe -90 to -55 mV). Neither of these situations would benefit from a plot centered at zero; in fact, it would look decidedly odd.
(Your other comment about log-log plots also seems odd to me, because the width of the line is almost never meaningful, unless there’s something like a confidence/credible interval band, which case that’s the whole point.