It's not just design though ...

I use Xara to pre-fill fields in a number of FORMS, some of the text boxes are smaller than the information needed to be in the box. I have a choice shrink the font or condense it slightly. Condensing works better, was quick to do.

Gary Priester produced a number of tutorials that required text to be stretched and skewed to give a pleasing view, as it's not always to be viewed face on as part of a design.

I do agree that straight text should be as designed, but that's more for a word processing application. graphic applications including text are normally not quite that straightforward, and sometimes require a measure of tweaking. Which was always easy to do until someone decided that on a website text shouldn't be distorted. It seems the website side of the application is beginning to drive the development.