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Honestly you’ve hit on one of the dumb things about equity markets. In theory, markets shouldn’t care about lumpy numbers since you can always borrow to smooth out your returns. In practice, dips and spikes see unwarranted reactions every time so firms will smooth out any figure they can, including dividends.

Markets can't realize anything, they have no sentience. The stock market is a graph of rich people's feelings, always has been. It reacts to rumors, sentiments and data, not reason.

This happens in many industries. I've worked at two companies where customers looking for a deal ordered at end of quarter.

Investors want a happy smooth graph of increasing sales every quarter, for no real logical reason.

It drives the price of most important product of Tesla, which is the TSLA stock.

Just like every publicly traded company.