A legitimate need, narrowly scoped
View-as tooling lets support staff see what a specific customer sees — their data, their configuration, their current state — in order to diagnose an issue without asking the customer to describe every detail themselves. Built deliberately, it's scoped to observation and diagnosis specifically, logged in detail, and often surfaces to the customer that their account was viewed, or requires something like their awareness or consent before or during the session.
This is a legitimate and often genuinely necessary capability for effective support. The design question isn't whether to have it, but how tightly its actual capability, visibility, and duration are bounded.
How the same capability turns into a quiet backdoor
The same underlying feature, built carelessly, becomes something close to unrestricted account impersonation: able to take action on the customer's behalf rather than just observe, usable routinely without any specific triggering issue, and logged poorly enough that its use isn't genuinely reviewable after the fact. Nothing about the feature's stated purpose changes between the well-scoped version and this one — the entire difference is in what the tooling was actually built to allow and how deliberately its use is tracked.