If I decided I wanted to visit one of our offshore dev teams, I could book a first-class ticket anytime I wanted to with no approval necessary. If I wanted $2m for some dev effort, I could have the necessary approvals in a day or so. But if I wanted to write 50 bytes to a .company.com cookie, that was weeks of meetings where I needed to justify my team's existence, the value of the feature we were building and prove there was no other way to implement it.
Admittedly it is a better practice than continuing to stuff you cookie and direct users to a strange page once in a while.
For example, after a merger in which two company websites should be integrated you might start with one simple cookie, transition quickly to two independent cookies on two domains, then use a cookie with two keys when the two sites have separate backends but the same domain, then eventually a cookie with a single key again after extensive replacements and reimplementations.