Most people prefer to play around and make several crappy attempts and combine them until the whole is somewhat solved, then go over and polish it a little, and maybe then add tests and fix the behavior in place.
For this last group, TDD it's jarring, unnatural and requires a lot of willpower to follow.
It's not bad in itself, it's just not for everyone.
The common struggle with TDD arises when people reduce it to writing glorified spell checkers. This usually goes hand in hand with the belief that unit tests must always check classes in isolation using excessive mocks—an approach that misses the real purpose of TDD.
It has less to do with thought patterns and more with simply misunderstanding the approach entirely because of clinging to the wrong dogmas they've heard somewhere.
I don't think that's the case. If they were really thinking up-front, they'd be doing proper req analysis and design work, rather than interactively growing a ball of mud that "does the minimal thing to pass a test". To me, it seems like TDD is sold as this "foolproof" design / dev approach, which is anything but.