This is what I and many other programmers have done (not the removal, but fake delays), because it improves user experience, actually:

1.When the user clicks a button that should take long in their mind (like uncompressing a zip file etc) but is actually fast, it might seem like something is wrong and it didn't work

2.When the user transitions between layouts of the application, if it loads everything too fast it will look too abrupt, a fake delay will be made here if a transition animation is not possible/doesn't fit

Used to work with a guy who would put 3 second sleeps after every line in our Jenkins file. He would then say how he's so busy because he has no time when he's always waiting for builds to run.

Chris, everyone knows what you were doing.

This is an old strategy described in this article from 2008: The Speedup Loop

"That is genius" - Elon Musk

uh oh you need to buy the new iphone because the current update makes your old iphone too slow to use.😉

You have to create your database without any indexes, then you can add them later for a speed boost

Users hate this one weird trick.

The trick is to have users in the first place if your new tool sucks due to slowness.

yeah, oldest trick in the book

For even better payoff reduce the sleep by 100-500 per major update

Who needs to add Sleep calls when you can just do your shitty every day naive implementation and let your future colleagues fix your mess.