Apparently some Canadian carriers do also have this as a SOP.
Around the time this happened I spoke to some friends who are ATCs (in the US) who all immediately agreed it was a very reasonable request, especially given that the request was made far enough out (so it wasn't like they'd have to quickly scramble to respace the incoming planes correctly in the sequence).
Because Lufthansa left a few hours late they arrived during a super busy arrival window. AFAIK ATC had nearly 30 planes already in the queue for landing with spacing for visual. To get Lufthansa in any sooner they'd need to send updated instructions to a lot of planes to make a gap.
If Lufthansa had arrived two hours earlier or later it wouldn't have been an issue. Indeed they were able to depart OAK around two hours later and land at SFO via IFR with no problems.
SFO handles a lot of traffic for having just two active runways - one of the reasons they constantly operate in parallel. Much like other super busy constrained airports (eg JFK) they have very little room to accommodate special requests.
Ideally Lufthansa would have let ATC know of this need while still a long way out so they could build a bubble in the sequence ahead of time but I don't know if procedures even allow for that.
Apparently some Canadian carriers do also have this as a SOP.
Around the time this happened I spoke to some friends who are ATCs (in the US) who all immediately agreed it was a very reasonable request, especially given that the request was made far enough out (so it wasn't like they'd have to quickly scramble to respace the incoming planes correctly in the sequence).