I first heard it from the military, where training seeks to recreate the stressful fast-pace conditions of an actual battle or war.

Years later I started hearing it in business too, as if management circles thought it would be useful in increasing production rates. Not accounting for the fact that levels of urgency similar to military training may not be sustainable in peacetime, and result in workforce burnout and other problems.

A better alternative I’ve seen in high-impact academic research groups is “focus”, rather than urgency. Focused effort produces research results, and can even be energizing rather than draining and burnout inducing. I would hope business circles would adopt that academic approach rather than the military one.

None of your statements disagree with the comment that you're replying to. All of those situations are ones in which people are nakedly demanding compliance

I didn’t say I disagreed.

That is not my experience at all. It's even used by sports announcers. As an example: "The offense needs to move with more sense of urgency given the clock."

In the workplace it's deployed against those with a blunted affect, ie on the autism or ADHD spectrum. If you're not visibly freaking out with everyone else, it's because you don't care. Sports probably doesn't have the same numbers of these populations as tech.

I've never seen it used in that kind of crude way. It is generally used when someone constantly is slow to respond or does not meet agreed milestones. In business, being late is much more noticeable in a negative way than being on the spectrum.

Your analogy is completely off base. There’s endurance sports and interval type of sports. The examples you provided are what seems to be interval type of sports.

High focus and high intensity is not sustainable over duration. Performance degrades over time without recovery.