That does make a certain amount of intuitive sense, in rough terms. In a certain "region" of the integral number line, based on the magnitude of the contained numbers, we expect a certain total number of prime factors. It makes sense that highly composite numbers might be near by primes in order to "balance out".

None of this is rigorous, but I think contains some intuition with a kernel of truth.

I recall a successful 'highest prime' search using a system that checked numbers of the form 2^n - 1 (or something like that)