Not exactly fixing, searching for an explanation, theoretic question

I recently noticed that if you write a URL in the location bar of your browser, if this URL is partial, or wrong, WordPress tries to correct it, serving the “right” page (I don’t know how WP chooses what page to serve).

I really don’t understand the sense of this feature (and I would like to serve a 404 page instead).

Does anyone know when this feature was implemented and why?