I signed up for one of the first MOOCs ever, about self driving cars by Sebastian Thrun, and of course PID was part of the curriculum.

I think that PID hits a certain sweet spot between cleverness, ease of implementation and practical utility that makes it catnip for the typical programmer's mind.

I liked it so much that when we had to implement it, I downloaded an open source driving simulator to see it work there instead of the simpler python environment we were using.