I imagine it's the cumulative amount of my first example, curl, and probably other "save as html" functionality in some browsers, crawlers, s3 buckets, archival tools, and so on. I'm sure many can do as you suggested and inject the header, but suspect many don't.
Another use case might be content that is authored in a content management system. Perhaps it's the easiest way to carry your intended charset to the destination.
Or we could have a default of UTF-8.
I don't dispute that it can be nice. I am just curious why so many say it is required.