Right, definitely implementation detail. In a DAW meant for the recording studio there is not much editing, you are dealing with full tracks for the most part and massive amounts of storage for all those takes; creating files is not much use here but in such a DAW you will hit the wall faster if you do a great deal of editing. In a DAW meant for production work it is fairly common to do a lot of editing and assembling tracks from many bits and pieces, creating files becomes more useful and gives you more headroom.

I was talking about NLEs, not video in general, just meant that I am not well versed in video in general, just dabble on occasion. After Effects and layering is quite different, probably can get away with 100ms of latency there without issue which gives a good deal of headroom compared to the ~5ms or less we need for a DAW.