Looping really isn't a benefit of them, it's just something other platforms do, so they did too. Shorts are meant for people with adhd attention spans who doom scroll for hours at a time not even completing more than a small fraction of the shorts they doom scroll past. Shorts are usually pretty obnoxious because they literally have about 1 second to catch the attention of an adhd doom scroller before they scroll past to the next. I really wish youtube would just give a PERMANENT turn off shorts filter. I know they have a setting on the web version to show fewer shorts for some period of time, like maybe a month, but this doesn't apply on TV streaming and especially mobile where they seem to prefer to shove shorts in your face.