Can you elaborate on the "desire to increase information asymmetry" bit? I mean, I get that the employer always wants to be on the upper hand in that way, but I don't see how questions like this do that.

Try and extract that level of detail about the company's internal dynamics, desires, and plans in an interview and see how far you get.

Well, I find I answer those types of questions at such a vague level of detail anyway that I don’t think anybody’s getting any real information out of my answers.

Eh, they're extracting more than a story from you. In the spirit of this post overall, the question is a great informal trigger for Imposter Syndrome: what you describe, and how you describe it.