This is about maintaining quality in ice cream. As someone else pointed out, most of the heat shock (melting/refreezing) that occurs in ice cream is on your drive home and in your freezer at home. After freezing under agitation, only about half of the water content of the ice cream base is frozen, but the number of ice nuclei is the highest it will ever be. Under second stage quiescent freezing these crystals just get larger as the percentage of liquid water approaches zero. All temperature fluctuations above about -20F contribute to the degradation of these ice crystals into larger crystals. All of the solids in the base help inhibit this process, especially stabilizers such as locust bean gum and guar gum.
These anti-freeze proteins serve a similar purpose to traditional stabilizers. Ice Cream is not a high profit margin industry, and any advances in maintaining quality are good overall.