Blame the Tetris Guideline. In the mid 2000s, they changed the rotation system, and under the new system, any player of intermediate skill can just play forever. Once you know the tricks to keeping a piece in play and building the stack in a way that you can always get a piece where you want it, you can’t lose until you voluntarily lose. That was, needless to say, a bit broken for leaderboard purposes. So as a bandaid solution to that, the main mode was changed from endless to 150 lines.
Blame the Tetris Guideline. In the mid 2000s, they changed the rotation system, and under the new system, any player of intermediate skill can just play forever. Once you know the tricks to keeping a piece in play and building the stack in a way that you can always get a piece where you want it, you can’t lose until you voluntarily lose. That was, needless to say, a bit broken for leaderboard purposes. So as a bandaid solution to that, the main mode was changed from endless to 150 lines.