No, it only does that on Apple Silicon. To this day, if you run the latest Homebrew on an Intel Mac running the latest macOS, it will install to /usr/local.
The parent indicates in a comment that they use an Apple Silicon Mac[1].
I don't see a lot of engineers running Intel Macs anymore. I haven't seen any engineers who still use an Intel model, myself, and for quite some time. Especially when there are Apple Silicon options for well under $1,000 that highly outperform the Intel models.
