If there is one thing that employers universally value across all sectors and all levels, it is an employee who is punctual. Most managers want to work with people who arrive on time, manage their workload effectively, and clock out before they start costing the company extra money. A perpetually late starter is somebody who is likely to be slacking on other metrics, too, and therefore will not be a good person to hire.
While most of us would agree that it is reasonable enough to expect an employee to have decent time management, there are undeniably examples of when this gets taken too far. At the end of the day, it is one quality of many that makes up an individual who is capable of doing their job successfully. There is a difference between expecting certain standards and using the clock as a form of control. Few independent adults are going to take kindly to a work environment that is judging their movement by the second, and that will penalize them for the most minor of time infractions. It simply isn't a reasonable way to conduct a business.