who would notice that 360 degrees isn't exactly one turn (at one degree per click).
Now that I've had coffee and shaken the cobwebs out of my skull: At one click per degree, it would take 11.25 knob rotations of a 32 click knob to go through 360 degrees of heading. So there's no direct correlation between knob position and heading.
One click per degree makes sense because that's a logical increment for changing a heading. Need to change by three degrees? Three clicks. But the reference for the absolute heading would be a readout. Not the knob position. One could get one click per degree and one knob turn for 360 degrees of heading. But then the angular size of a click would be pretty small and difficult to set precisely by hand.
Back in the analog days, it was common practice to have a dial indicator concentric with a knob. But to gear the knob so that one degree of indicated change would take 10 degrees or so of knob rotation, making precise settings easier to accomplish. But the gear ratio between knob and dial wasn't exact (in some cases a friction drive).
When we went to digital controls, separating the display and knob functions, it made sense to add detents to the knob for touch feedback. So, one degree per click and let the software keep track of the absolute setting. The click size can then be anything that gives precise and easy control.
There are two ways of implementing a digital knob: A position encoder, that actually reads the knob position, multiplies it by some ratio and keeps track of the number of turns in software. Or, more simply, a knob that produces a single pulse plus a direction of rotation signal, letting the software increment/decrement the absolute value. This is much like a computer mouse, which has no idea where it is but sends the system up/down, left/right pulses and lets the software calculate from that. The latter is much easier to implement. A dual rate knob would simply check the rotation speed (clicks per second) and increment/decrement at a faster rate. All done in software.