Most of the cases it is actually only for the sake of profit. In many cases the whales of the token in question are the same developers of the project, it is a way for them to earn money in the future when their project advances and they decide to sell some of their new fortune in their native token, in some way, it is like having a private company and then going public in the stock market, but without all the oversight from authorities and regulators.

Only case, once I found a centralized exchange from Panama Wich was fairly small compared to Coinbase and Binance, and to my surprised they had decided to launch their own token with did not have many features, just some bonuses and centralized stuff.