I know it's a clickbait title, but this is a serious question. Recently, in Sri Lanka, the government deployed https://fuelpass.gov.lk/ application where a Sri Lankan can register and check the fuel available for the registered vehicle. (The system was designed to control the amount of fuel available to an individual as fuel imports have slowed down due to the economic crisis).

When I checked the system yesterday I realized that they have deployed the dev build to production. As I was going through the code, I noticed that in the Login component, there is a setTimeout call on the form submit to show a loading animation.

The login component looked something like this:

export default () => {
    const [waiting, setWaiting] = useState(false)

    return(
        <Loading showLoading = {waiting}>
            <form onSubmit = {() => {
                setWaiting(true)

                setTimeout(async () => {
                    await loginRequestCall()
                    setWaiting(false)
                }, Math.floor(Math.random() * 5000)
            }}>
                <input />
                <button>Send OTP</button>
            </form>
        </Loading>
    )
}

Screenshot of the source code:

The important part is, when user clicks on the Send OTP, It shows the loading screen, only after waiting a random amount of time it sends the request.

I created a video about this and it kinda went viral in Sri Lanka. According to the comments, some of the justifications (for using setTimeout with a random amount of time to wait) were following.

1. It is a mechanism to prevent DDos attacks
2. Way to prevent users spamming Send OTP button causing multiple requests
3. It is a cheap way of load balancing (way to reduce the number of OTP requests)

I wouldn't think if someone wanted to DDos they would be dumb enough to use UI automation. There is no need of setTimeout to prevent spam also.

Which leave me with the last point.

So my questions are,

1. Is it possible to load balance using setTimeout?
2. If so, how exactly would it distribute the load?
3. Is there a valid reason to add a setTimout?