I did find a disquieting resemblance to windows 98's ancient behavior, a behavior which annoyed me even then. But it's apparently a real standard now, known as "zeroconf", and the dhcpcd maintainers decided to be all helpful and implement it just because it's a standard now.

It's not a "distribution" thing, though distributions have the choice whether to compile in that feature at all or not. And not all distributions use dhcpcd.