This actually strikes me as an example of a political decision creating a stickiness to academic formal standards (as others point out this has become a policy for various organizations' approval of findings). Since the "replication crisis" that happened in the last decade, a lot of people's explanations for this have centered around the use of the fisherian significance test and how gameable it can be, as well as pressures toward publishing positive results. I think there's some merit to solutions involving changing those standards and a lot of STEM people have advocated for them. However, things like drug trials have politically-determined standards that need to be upheld, and some of those standards have become well-known by the general public, so they can't really be bugfixed quickly