My wildly-speculative guess: some executive saw someone use “Inspect Element” and hosted an urgent meeting about how to solve this security risk. Rather than try to explain why it’s not a security risk, the dev team just placated the exec by saying “we could just disable right-click.”

Actually, I've seen many videos of Indian scammers using "inspect element" to generate some fake "accidental money transfers" on their victim's bank account. They'll invent some way to make their victims believe that they've done something wrong and that they've received too much of a "refund" and then they'll either go the "I'm going to lose my job please send back the 30,000" card or the "this is a crime, the fbi will call you if you don't cooperate" card.

Making it difficult to inspect element+replace value might actually be worth the effort. I've seen a Kitboga video where a simple transparent div covering the entire page had the scammed stumped for minutes because they didn't actually understand HTML.

It certainly doesn't prevent viruses, but for scams it may just be enough to save some people.

In the old days (CompuServ and AOL era of the internet) a lot of sites used it as an easy way of reducing the number of 'right click, save picture' type visitors. It never stopped the determined but reduced it by at least 90%. I have no idea why it is used today though.

Probably some combination of security theater and well-intentioned but shallow, nearsighted and misguided attempt to increase security by reducing a perceived attackable surface area (i.e. likely somebody got scared with "View source" or something like that).

A lot of Japanese lyric websites disable right click. My hypothesis is because the Japanese Collection Society have very backward thinking about sharing lyric.

https://www.techdirt.com/2010/03/03/japanese-collection-soci...