As a user that started my GUI life on an older Mac, hold-release menus always felt intuitive and "sticky menus" really felt weird when I first encountered them.
The logic behind that initial design was that menus were really just "buttons with options" and a mouseup should initiate an action. The menus had few items so there wasn't much dragging involved.
As software evolved, menus grew and spending an entire click on "present me with your selection of options" just became sensible.