A and H pawn pushing

Many beginners seem to push these pawns at the start of the game? Sometimes far as they can. As if trying to promote to a queen or something. I fail to see what type of benefit this would have. My only guess is that they're hoping I think its a free pawn.

I think it happens due to a lack opening concepts such as center control, develop minor pieces first and castle early. They don't know what to do, so I think the line of thinking is the rook is so powerful, let's activate him.

My rook note goes out to those that push the H and A file pawns early.

In general that is premature, though rook pawn pushing is either done by strong or very weak players. Strong players use it timely to start a pawn storm on the enemy king, or as a minority attack to weaken the pawn structure of the opponent for instance. In the opening however it is usually much better idea to develop (there are some exceptions, for instance sometimes a3/a6 or h3/h6 is played to stop the opponent's minor piece move to b4/b5 or g4/g5 and to create a safe square for your king to disallow back rank mates, but in many cases this is not needed at the start of the game and it is a waste of time).

when you're rated at around 950 and play 3-10 minute games, you gotta go for the surprise attacks. no one expects it and most of the time they don't know what to do against it. maybe it'll stop working if i get rated a little bit higher but until then, i'm going to do some more Ware Crab variation