Running your turbo diesel 24/7

I went touring on berthoud pass yesterday with some friends. We parked at the summit lot and the guy next to us was just running his diesel while gearing up. We pulled up in a turbo diesel as well which we shut off immediately after parking as anyone with common sense typically does.

Anyway, all the fumes from the exhaust were blown directly at us while we were gearing up which was pretty irritating and we were scratching our heads a bit while this dude spent about 20 minutes standing OUTSIDE his truck while it was just idling the entire time. Finally, one of my buddies walked up to him and asked what the deal was with keeping his car running (he had a weird auxiliary exhaust pipe too).

The guy explained that it was better for his truck to keep it running that then smugly added that he only bought it to avoid emissions testing. He said he pretty much keeps his truck running 24/7 and that my friend should be doing the same if he wanted his truck to last. Then he tried to befriend us by lecturing about sick his tech was compared to ours.

At this point, we were pretty sure this guy was the first douchebag we had met in 2019.

I wanted to tell him that if he enjoyed playing in the snow so much he should maybe turn the fucking pick up off every now and then but i didn't feel like making a scene. He probably would've just gone off about how he didn't believe in climate change, plus we really just wanted to go skiing and didn't want to give this guy an excuse to keep talking to us.

Truck enthusiasts of NS: is this a thing? will keeping it running 24/7 benefit your diesel truck?

For the record: I have nothing against turbo diesels and I know that a lot of people own them out of necessity. It's no secret that they are terrible for the environment, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't kind of want one lol

apologies for the long post and lack of grammatical consistency