I'm not so sure. It's better than a late night window in that it forces their customers to actually deal with the engineering window, rather than just cross their fingers.
Also, your office is full of awake engineers at that time. Which is better than a handful of on-call sleepy engineers and crossing your fingers the rest of the team wakes up when you call them if something goes completely haywire.
With the B2 target use case of backup and archive data I suspect it's actually a good time to do it for their customer base (and it also then happens to be good for their engineering team too, awake and alert!).
Thursday is the best maintenance day. If it goes haywire, you have a full business day to fix before losing a weekend. And if you can't, well, you've given your coworkers a "free Friday," which is far less likely to result in complaints than screwing up M-Th.
Ever go into work on Friday and "the system is down"? You can't get anything done, because the tools you use to do your job aren't working, and the fix is out of your hands. Your coworkers are all affected, too. First people are frustrated, because they have tasks deadlines, and those tasks won't get done and the deadlines won't be met. A few are really freaked out and start calling bosses and getting VPs to yell at other VPs. But soon, most people in the company realize that everybody else is in the same boat, and nobody will be meeting their OKRs this week, and the status reports probably won't be filed.
Then they relax.
If they're in offices, they group up, maybe in the break room. A rousing game of ping-pong breaks out.
Remote coworkers ping each other on Slack. Maybe a few start a round of Among Us. Bread dough is kneaded. Kids get a little more help with their schoolwork.
Everybody takes a very long lunch.
By 2pm, people realize the entire day is gone. Almost everybody has left or signed off by 3. Some roll out to bars; others go home to their kids, or to their gardens or garages or battlestations. Everybody beats the traffic.
Come Monday, the system is fixed. People are a little stressed out, since there's so much catching-up to do, status reports to be filed, widgets to be tracked and poked. But everybody agrees that was an amazing couple of days, and they got lots of rest, and it sure was nice. And hey, I had this great idea over the weekend—
