As far as I can tell its main purpose is to ensure half of any thread that features someone using it is about that instead of the actual topic.

In that sense, what’s “with” it is poor writing.

In many ways, it would make more sense to use a leading 1 for A.D. years instead of a leading 0. This way, 1984 would become 11984, and the year when Caesar died, 44 B.C. (which is astronomical year –43) would be the year 09957. With this system, which is known as the Holocene calendar, we can specify any year during the period of history for which we know actual year numbers without having to distinguish between B.C. and A.D. (and deal with quirky off-by-one errors due to skipping the year 0) or use negative numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

Might be this: https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

It makes you wonder if this is a time traveler

The better question is: why only one leading zero.