It's because the algorithm is easy to implement and efficient in terms of compute usage to match a gesture. It's a "cheap and easy" recognizer, a $1 recognizer. The name has spawned a whole host of similarly named papers which you can see on their "impact" page https://depts.washington.edu/acelab/proj/dollar/impact.html.

Was expecting cheap hardware, then looked through the whole page trying to figure out what this had to do with money.

I think the name is genius, you'll never forget it and if you ever need to implement a basic stroke recognizer you'll undoubtedly think of this. At least this is what I have done many times in the last decade.