That pref is really meant to be activated only when you want the selected track(s) to resize themselves. You should leave it off ordinarily. You can assign a key stroke to it in the key commands dialog, and switch it on the fly.
It’s kind of hard to talk about what you did or never did, etc., due to the extremely fallible nature of human memory. But, you can test it yourself though, for your own edification.
- Create an empty project and add a few tracks, any kind.
- Activate the pref.
- Select a track and resize it. Observe its height.
- select another track, observe how the first one changes, and this one it resizes to have the same
- height the first one had.
Now, De-activate the pref, do steps 2 and 3 and observe what happens.