It’s a valid method that avoids some edge cases where Excel’s autocomplete gets confused. He just forgot the last step of copy and then paste back into the same cells as text to remove the formula.

My pet peeve is my coworker who finds it easier to write macros to analyze the data instead of setting up formulas, and then I am completely unable to follow his analysis logic because it’s all just columns of numbers with no way to tell what was used to calculate what.

Charitably, could there be some kind of regional difference where people living in certain places truly have something different? Over the winter, I came across a thread asking for radiator repair advice, and people from parts of the world with water radiators were very casual “open it up for investigation” while people from parts of the world with steam radiators were like “do not open anything you will die”. Lots of confused comments, too, until someone figured out the disconnect.