Preloader before jumping to your main Dashboard/stream

I noticed some sites, after signing up, provide a screen that tells you they're customizing content for you.

What is the main purpose of this? Does this make this feel more personal instead of taking you to your Dashboard/main feed immediately?

I understand one possibility of implementing this could be that there is an actual lag in the backend, but I also came across an article on FastCoDesign where they mention that sometimes, preloaders are intentionally added to make it feel like we "are actually doing something for our users" instead of providing interfaces that are somewhat robotic.

Before Twitter takes you to your main feed, you first see this:

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Same with Tumblr:

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And Medium:

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I could cite more examples, but these are just a few.

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