It's a bit of a stretch to call it cocaine. Those nutrients are food for the plants, so they don't develop tolerance or get addicted. They get fat and slow (in plant terms that would be stretched and weak). I've always been of the school that says the lowest amount necessary is the amount to use, so I have never ventured anywhere near overfertilizing.
There is an aesthetic consideration related to growing succulents, and you can affect how they look by how much light you give them, or how much nutrients you give them, or various other things, in cultivation. In that sense the grower realizes a vision based on the parameters they set for their plants. My goal is for my plants to be compact, relatively chunky in their proportions, as they grow. The average greenhouse grower might have different priorities from mine. Whatever, I'd rather wait longer and have my plant be smaller overall if that will help it develop the most compact form. So I turn the light up and the nutrients down. Sometimes I see plants for sale that have been overfed and grown soft, and it actually makes me recoil a little, like it's a reminder of what I am trying to avoid in my own space.
The advice I like to give to novices is to use fertilizer if they like for their succulents, but only in a limited and measured way. More is not better, as you all have pointed out. .
That said, fertilizer that comes out of a bottle with a certain strength (I use one that's 7-9-5 at the moment) will always be that strength, so you don't have to guesstimate any part of the nutrient input. So you get perfect consistency. Which is a real advantage because you can be sure your synthetic nutrients are not exceeding a reasonable or helpful dose, every single time you use them.
