I've actually used this fact in a related way, for wayfinding.

Old school Open-CV was able to see tracks well from an onboard monocular camera, but calibration and scale was annoying. Track width is accurate enough that I was able to use it to input a bunch of head-end video to map the tracks.

It was mostly just a modified edge detect where the tracks approximately would be. Once finding the tracks, you could automatically calculate the camera's height, lateral location, and angle.

My preferred one for EE folks is that reportedly the first Arduino boards (now 20 years old?) had a mistake in their eCAD where the second pair of headers was 0.05 instead of 0.1" apart. But it was too late by the time they caught it. And now, 20 years later, even high end microcontroller boards ship with that same gap to be compatible.

Lookup why torpedo's are almost universally 21" in diameter. The short version: because that was how big they were last time. There is no reason beyond 21" being usrd once upon a time and nobody wanting to break from it and have the old torpedos not work in the new boats.

Isn't that one a hoax though?