I completely agree. I'm lucky to work in an environment where management aren't too fussy about sticking to deadlines, as long as progress is pretty decent. It's a nice way of working, I use system 1 for estimates which generally works pretty well and saves time needlessly trying to pin down an exact eta. On the whole our team delivers a lot of features on time and generally doesn't go over 2 weeks late for anything, even though it often wouldn't matter if we did go over.

I appreciate that sometimes hard deadlines are necessary but if I can I'll always avoid them.