It probably favours the American viewers who are not general sports fans, but only want to see a few medals being decided. If you're a fan of Olympics/general sports, no matter the timezone it just sucks when there's hours and hours without finals, and then a boatload of finals crammed in 2-3 hours so you can't see them all, even though there would have been plenty of time to schedule it in such a way that you could actually see them all.
Like in Pyeongchang: almost every day there was a time when for several hours almost nothing happened, and then all of a sudden 4-5 finals happened in the same moment, so even with a lot of available time it was impossible to watch everything live.