I played this game earlier this year and I loved it. I added it to my "speedrun" list and my friend started his first playthrough on it recently, so I figured I would start learning the speedrun for it. When I saw time started from a save and you skipped the entire beginning I closed the video and decided to pass. That seems like it defeats the entire purpose of a speedrun, skipping part of the run just to allow the user to get into things easier.

I dont know why it was decided to do it like this in the first place: but the first part has a consistent skip in the prison cell (that doesnt add anything than a few seconds and endless skip scenes more to the run) and the code of the suitcase is the only RNG in the game. I think especially the latter was wanted to avoid. Im not sure skipping this early part of the game makes things a lot easier but remove a sequence of many tedious skip scenes, that I played to start my runs many times as well. I would argue, that this doenst make the game much easier but easier to start a new run.

The decision was made because the intro is consistent enough that the initial runners all ended up with identically matching times for the intro segment. The community then decided it was logical to skip it as there were no skill checks during that segment and we were mostly just waiting for cutscenes to finish. This was further proven when the jail cell skip was found, making the intro just a 3-second "run to the door and clip out and then sit in a cutscene for several minutes" section, which really wasn't fun nor conducive to doing multiple run attempts back to back.

There's nothing stopping you from doing that part in the run and just beginning timing after that, but for the sake of making resets quicker and more comfortable I'd recommend skipping the intro.