Not sure why this became a trend my guess is back when everyone was trying to update their website to support mobile devices, they want to deliver an 'app-like' experience and as native apps don't let you pinch zoom the native UI wherever you like and mobile sites followed suit.

I guess the issue now is it has become part of the cargo cult with people including these meta tags in their base templates without knowing what it does and failing to implement a suitable layout for all mobile device screen sizes and DPIs.

https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/inde...