Perspective projection draws distant things smaller; isometric projection keeps the scale of all three axes constant instead. It comes from mechanical drafting, where the point was showing a part's proportions accurately without any foreshortening distortion.
That very precision became an appeal for games (SimCity, Diablo) and infographics — buildings or data can look dimensional while staying proportionally consistent top to bottom, which makes many objects easy to compare side by side, like a map. On the web, without real 3D, CSS transform (a rotate+skew combination, or true 3D transforms using rotateX/rotateY) builds a cube's three visible faces — top and two sides — to fake it.
It shows up often in "how our product works" illustrations on marketing sites and SaaS onboarding screens. Building a complex scene by hand is labor-intensive, so it's common for an illustrator to draw it in SVG and let CSS handle only a light animation layer — a bit of rotation, a bit of floating.