Of course businesses want to be able to de-risk by having highly accurate predictions of the future. Too bad those don't exist in any domain of business planning.
More often, the focus on estimating comes from management layers where incentives are not structured to reward anyone for accurate estimates, merely to punish them for missed deadlines.
Time to finished is only one dimension of estimation. With any unit of engineering work there may be code debt added or removed, complexity increased or decreased, morale increased or decreased, etc.
Focusing only on time, especially in a punitive way surely negatively impacts the others.