It was used as an industrial communications bus to coordinate slave devices from a master controller. Drop-length was a non-issue as the majority of our devices used an in-rail (DIN mounted) interconnect bus. The larger "drops" were often a under 10" and just jumped one DIN rail to the next DIN rail in the cabinet.
This was selected for the following reasons:
1. These devices were installed in HEAVY EM environments (think in close proximity to very large electric motors) and the electrical characteristics
2. The system topology physically supported multi-drop
3. We had a good deal of talent with CAN experience
4. Our device was already supporting a bunch of wired and wireless protocols (rs422, rs485, ethernet, btle, wifi, etc) and tbh CAN support was a gimme on the SOM we used as the device's core, so initially it made it into consideration by chance