I know what drifting is. The wheel is moving sideways across the ground as well as forwards. Not locked, but not just rolling along either. Skidding, basically. Just because it takes more skill doesn't mean it's a good idea.
All contextual really isn’t it?
You tend to find the tallentless Marys who aren’t willing to ride corners properly will brake heavily on the approach to corners, so they can trundle through at a minimal pace (probably jabbing at the brakes on the way through the corner too). Even if they don’t lock up and skid doing this they will place extra pressure at different points on the trail surface and enough of this nonsense over time does result in divets, puddles and wave/washboard effect corner entries in a lot of cases (we’ve all seen trails like this)…
Riders regularly difting through a corner tends to result in uniform displacement of material through the apex of a corner towards the outside, often forming a mini berm and/or uniform grove/rut in that corner, at least a smother, easier and often, actually safer to ride line than a bumpy, diveted, knackered trail from brake jabbers…
Most trails are built considering braking points and corners/feature which allow an “Off the brakes” rider to carry speed smoothly with minimal damage to the surfaces (riding with “flow” if you like), a bit of drifting is often expected in certain places as that carried speed may well usefully feed into the next section of the trail…
Just because you’re riding slowly doesn’t mean you’re not damaging the trails for everyone else, pretty much everything you do on a trail causes some degree of damage, there are different forms of damage and some have more of an effect than you might think….