If your friend is in their equipment room, you know exactly what they’re up to.
In many games, all of this would happen purely with text on a screen, but manifesting those functions as a physical lobby feels natural, especially because of the social aspect. If your friend is in their equipment room, you know exactly what they’re up to. Same thing if you see them looking over the map table. That’s contraty to many multiplayer flatscreen games where menus are wholly individual affairs and you’ll often find teammates asking each other “are you ready?” “are you picking a level?”.