If I were to guess, how one might get into that habit is being annoyed by error messages:

"cannot remove 'foo': is a directory"

Just remove the darned object you're given as an argument using the appropriate implementation for its type.

"rm: remove write-protected regular file 'foo'?"

The rules are that if the directory is writable, the object can be deleted. Though you called stat to figure out it's a regular file, you didn't notice the link count: I have two more hard links to the file in the same directory, and one elsewhere. But, yes, unlink it.

If git repositories didn't need a -f to rm I wouldn't, but its a habit from git repos giving errors.

I have this bad habit. Because in linux everything is a file, so screw you rm stop telling me i can't delete that directory. Its just a file that points to another directory. Its messing up my flow.

Starting out with that behavior because it comes up a lot in tutorials, probably. And then not making a typo mistake earlier on to learn the lesson to not do that with every rm command.

I'd probably have that habit if I didn't once delete everything in a /bin directory early on in my learning, and luckily it was in a VM.