Shock absorption/dampening with every step. Most kitchen floors are going to be concrete so every step has no give and the shock of the impact has no where to go but into your joints and bones.
Imagine banging your head against a brick wall over and over. Shoes are like wearing a helmet, the pads are a pillow against the wall.
I’m a welding engineer and in 10 years of working in automotive manufacturing all of the controls engineers I worked with were electrical engineers who did basically ladder logic on PLCs all day every day. PLCs and ladder logic are the back bone of pretty much all industrial automation, of which the automotive world uses extensively