alt Hacker NewsThis is partly (or perhaps even rather significantly) due to the relatively new (say, 20-30 years) distributed aspects of music production.
In the 1970s, you began to see the emergence of the drummer "playing to the click" and the main motivation behind this was that some number of the rest of the performers were not in the room and/or not recording at the same time as the drummer. If you let the drummer just do their human thing, the timing will wander a bit in ways that are hard to follow and respond to if you were not in the room. So producers and engineers began to use click tracks to ensure that now matter when/where the differ performers actually recorded their work, everyone would be locked together.
If you record all together in a single space at a single time, you generally don't need this (unless the musicians are not very good and the drummer still wanders a lot).
So it's a phenomenon that didn't begin with DAWs and computers - that technology just took the overall approach even further.
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I have some friends who do live shows, and they use a click track - not so much to keep in sync with each other, but to keep in sync with the lights and projections (which are pre-programmed).
The author of the piece claims playing to the click is not gridification, and I agree. Even with a click track to keep you on beat, there will still be a natural push and pull of the rhythm.
In my cheesy work-friends jam band, I (the drummer) tried using a click track when we'd record just the drums, and it never went well. I would invariably get frustrated that I wasn't keeping up with it and we'd end up with jagged skippy parts where I was trying to get back on track. I'm sure it was just an experience thing, but ultimately I ended up just recording my part first (sans click track), and the other members just used in-ear monitors of my part while they were recording theirs, and it worked out just fine