I had this to a significant degree as a child, back in the world where "autism" only meant "profoundly non verbal" and such a diagnosis had nothing to do with me (and yes it could be distressing. Even to this day I sometimes feel sad about deleting text in documents and replacing it with similar text, experiencing the desperation of a perfectly fine word about to no longer exist. I told a therapist about this like ten years ago and she looked me blankly. I guess I still have this). I wrote a whole essay called "The Floor's Opinion" in grade school and I was hailed as a creative genius.

In that recent story in the NYT about dating agencies for people on the spectrum, so many of the comments (in the NYT, not here) were very angry at how the definition of autism has been so greatly expanded in recent decades to include people who are high functioning. The commenters felt it took away from their own children's diagnoses, not just in name but also in terms of competition for resources, and didnt see what the point was for people who were low on the spectrum.

But I will say when they identify specific traits that I've always wondered about and even told clueless therapists about, it feels way better to know a little bit of the reasoning for why you have some freakish habit.