I'm going to guess they knew they didn't have a great high-altitude engine and wanted to maximize their low-to-medium altitude fighters. The typical Soviet triangular wing makes a good rolling platform and the lower aspect ratio and area concentrated closer to the centerline makes for a good dogfighting platform in the lower altitude region if not bungled by mistakes. The I-185 wasn't quite so triangularly pronounced, but was nontheless similarly tapered, too.
One thing about the Soviet system that stood out was that failure did not generally have a good result for the entity who failed. It was sometimes fatal, literally. When the first triangular wing platform came out and was successful, the rest of the designers likely copied the concept, thinking it would give a better probabiliity of not failing. Even the early Yakovlev jets had the same wing and same fuselage. The next breakout platform was the MiG-15 and there were several jets with the same basic layout.
I can think of the La-15, IL-40/42, IL-102, La-168, La-176, La-190, MiG-17, MiG-19, Su-15, and Yak-25 with siumilar wing layouts to the MiG-15, which was a highly successful design if ever there was one. 17,300 or so built in several countries.
The Soviet Union had decades of designers copying successful designs to help ensure they wouldn't be sent to the gulag or killed if their design failed to meet spec. It was likely a very good thing for Soviet designers of aircraft, ships, electronics, and guns when Stalin passed away.