It's also something that beginning writers fall into... I run a creative writing site that is for groups of authors to write collective branching fiction together. It's like choose-your-own-adventure but with a slightly more literary focus, where choices are about character and plot choices, rather than just like dungeon exploration. As part of that we encourage third-person past tense, but it's interesting how frequent it is that a new author will come in write their first couple of chapters in present tense - even if the chapters they are following up on are in past tense.