The form of this story has used widely since, and those stories have been incredibly popular with both authors and audiences for well over 100 years now. Implying that a tried-and-true technique of story-telling lies outside of storycraft betrays basic a lack of understanding of the subject.
Story tellers enjoy this form for the challenge of balancing what the omniscient narrator reveals-- too much or too strong in one direction and the whole thing falls flat. Readers enjoy the form because it feels a bit like ski jumping-- the writer provides the momentum and the reader's imagination leaps off the end with all the story's implications flying past.
In fact, Nabokov balanced this same form masterfully in the short story, "Signs and Symbols." The effect there is that the reader leaps off into a level of... well, I don't want to ruin it. :) But it's enough to say that outside of VR I don't think that story could have been effectively written without using the lady-or-the-tiger form.
