I think it comes from north america brain/settler brain, where settlers roll in, kill/replace the original inhabitants who were living there for millennia, and “found” a “new” settlement that you can assign a founder to. Then you export that way of thought to places where it has no basis in reality and you end up with roman statue avatar twitter guys (and musk apparently) actually believing that cities that have existed since cities began could have singular founding figures and didn’t organically emerge because it’s a good place to settle down