mainly because it works, it makes learning the denoising process stable, because at each step the added noise is not too much, it makes it easy for the AI to figure out the changes that occurred the try and remove the added noise, plus the changes in its weight won't be large for each denoising step, am pretty sure you have been in a math class and have had to simplify some complex equation, imagine your teacher shows you the complex long equation, and then he just writes the simplified equation under it without showing the steps ? .... yeah, that will make it hard for you to learn anything, you can still figure it out because you are human, and your teacher already taught you about BODMAS and some rules of math but still it will be difficult, most diffusion are just that, diffusion models, they don't have human level reasoning etc.

Even for humans, when changes happen rapidly, it makes it hard to predict what actually happened. Imagine how hard it will be for you if you haven't learnt about BODMAS and stuff and you are exposed to math expression and the final solution? Gradual steps lead to better learning in humans, it works for ai too.

Yeah, so you begin with small steps, hopefully during the small steps the ai learns the fundamental rules of the operations, which is equivalent to a teacher showing each step because you are new to the material, then after you have some familiarity, teachers begin to skip steps and sometimes don't show steps at all.