Yeah. Officially it's to avoid centralization. The idea is that anyone can mine the coins, not just rich people with ASIC mining farms.

They also wanted to avoid GPUs originally, and some new altcoins (also known as shitcoins) try to do this as well from time to time. I've been known to either cloud-mine or what I call "Indian-data-center" mine such coins.

I personally like it when a new CPU-only or GPU-only coin comes out because I can mine with my own hardware. My ASIC miner never made ROI before the Bitcoin difficulty got to high that it would never pay back the power bill costs.

It would be cool if such "GPU resistant" coins became popular, because it would encourage people to figure out new ways to program GPUs.