You can only do the DROP TABLE trick if you know nothing else is writing to the table at the same time. You know if that's the case, according to your business logic. The database has no idea.
The DROP TABLE trick effectively bypasses all the normal guarantees of data consistency. This is why it's so fast. But you have to know that that's a safe thing to do for your data.
The tricky part is that the latency characteristics of these operations would be pretty surprising and unintuitive. It has the same problems as virtual memory and mark/sweep GC; sometimes, depending on system state and things that other threads are doing, an unrelated operation might block for very long time periods and give you huge user-visible pauses. It's often better to force these expensive operations to be explicit so that the developer has to think through the latency & consistency implications and make the tradeoffs they want.