I wouldn’t call it a hack, it’s just that modeling is a huge endeavor and if you spend all your time doing things manually, operations are going to take forever, so we find ways to optimize thing to reach our end goal. A hack would be stressing something to the point of breaking. It’s much like the select similar menu, as in Blender takes advantage of certain properties that are present in the mesh and leans on their similarities to maximize ways in favor of time spent on the model. In other words, it’s like squeezing oranges with your bare hands versus one of those plastic things where you press the orange against it versus and electric fruit squeezer, each time you are just elevating the productivity and doing things with less effort.
