Hi, I'm the author of NProgress. Yes! It's intentional.

You can disable this by removing the `cursor: wait` rule in the CSS file.

That cursor makes me think that the browser has crashed/hung/is not responding.

Honestly, I'd consider nixing it altogether by default. Even though it's in the CSS spec, :wait effectively duplicates an action that has a rather particular meaning at the level of the OS. Confusion over it is probably more common than one might expect.