Ensures that dependencies have at least as high priority as dependents

This recursively passes priorities down to dependents so if task A depends on task B, task B must have at least as high a priority as A. This avoids situations where extremely high priority tasks only end up running after all the low-priority tasks have finished because it depends on the one that runs last.
Yeah, it's only during scheduling. Generally we schedule a task before its dependencies because scheduling starts at the root and works its way down.