I think that ultimately, DMs that Fudge are doing so to try to make the game more enjoyable for their players. I can appreciate that sentiment, if only because I've been in games without fudging where my character has died unclimactically and left me doing nothing for the rest of the session (such as literally being killed by "rocks fall, you failed your reflex save and die")
Despite that, I still no longer Fudge as a DM today, and prefer my DM to not Fudge when I play. I believe that part of learning to DM well is learning how to design proper challenges for your players, how to tailor the deadlines of an adventure to what they're comfortable with, and how to advise them of their choices and help mitigate death by dumb when possible.
I leave off with an anecdotal story about fudging that likely killed it for me. I was a halfling barbarian who specialized in throwing axes and had hair that covered my whole body. I was the fighting shrew. We were in an adventure where a city was overrun by undead and we needed to find the source of this Curse. Those who were bit turned, and we were running out of time. We fought our way to a castle where a mage and his black Knight lackey were orchestrating the whole affair, and had a climactic battle. I nearly died several times, and the Knight in particular hit like an ogre and took all of us to finally take down.
By the end of the adventure we all felt good about ourselves and really enjoyed it. Later, I was hanging out with my DM and we talked about the game. Then the strangest thing happened. He was a relatively new DM, and he admitted to me he didn't actually use stats in the adventure. He just went by what we rolled. If we rolled what he felt was high enough, we hit, if bad guys rolled well, they hit. He just arbitrarily decided damage, and went with his gut.
It destroyed my fond memories of the adventure. I no longer felt like we were heroes who saved a city. I no longer felt like my character was a killing machine of 3ft stature. I felt like I had been along for a ride of DM whim, like my choices didn't matter, only how the DM felt. It sucked, because before I knew that, I loved the game.
Now I'm not saying what my DM did was the norm for fudging. I know he was a particularly ham fisted proponent of fudging and isn't what people usually consider when they think of the term. But in my case, I vowed to never simulate that style of game. I wanted the Dice rolls and player decision to matter.
To me, that means no fudging.