And because, well, gosh -- "reading". Especially all those icky complete sentences and stuff. Which has definitely gone out of style, especially among the smartphone-addicted set ("if I can't digest or respond to it while thumbing my phone, it doesn't really exist").
Have I perhaps lost touch with modern practices?
No, they've lost touch with you.
This can then be used to show customers or auditors that we have been diligent and designed the system carefully, even if they find some flaws.
They can be slightly tricky to maintain and to get right. But not nearly as ticky as maintaining software for which there's at best only a partial sense of a coherent shared mental model available to the stakeholders (not to mention the developers) as to what this piece of software is supposed to do. Other than a slew of JIRA tickets written by a cast of thousands, and assigned to a zillion different developers over the years.