Social status and exclusivity plays into it in practice, for sure, in a right-out fetishistic sense: Like there’s chefs who have onions chopped so fine, using a special technique (not the usual chef technique you see) that they melt in the sauce, very labour-intensive. Now, having the onions melt into the sauce is a nice and valid thing, however, why in the everloving fuck aren’t you using a blender. Even if there’s a difference, which all my experience tells me there isn’t, it’s going to have such a minimal return on investment it’s utterly pointless but as an exercise in exclusivity.
Also I like my potato mash chunky but that’s another topic.