Three things.

1. Yes. Sometimes this is malice. Sometimes this is an attempt to drive impressions and page views.

2. This can also be caused by poorly configured web applications that update in real time. If, say, some sports website is giving you real-time data about the game as it progresses, a poorly configured web application might be creating a dynamic URL for every change. When you access the older page, it will be instructed to take you to the most recent data, so pressing back is taking you to old data on that page, and then immediately realizing that data is old so refreshing it with the most relevant data.

3. This is a super common misconfiguration in single page web applications. Domain.com will take you to an application that will take you to domain.com/en-us/home. Pressing back takes you to domain.com, and guess what happens next?

This is basically 99.99% of these cases. I would say if it isn’t on some shitty news site with 1000 ads that somehow sneak by AdBlock and UBlok Origin, it’s case 1. Otherwise, it’s case 2 or 3.