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Well, whether or not people's preferences change drastically over that time, they will face the hard constraint of getting a supervisor in a particular field. If there are too many people taking electives in a field and going into the qualifiers, more will fail in that field in that year, since the department knows it doesn't have the resources to cope with that.
After the first year, PhD students begin to understand this mechanism and take "realistic" electives. If you're not among the best, you'll know you'd better do something that's less popular, or you're really taking chances.
So whether you change your intended field based on this consideration or because classes influence your preferences (which does happen a lot): the department will end up with the right mix of field choices. Hence it doesn't have to worry during admissions.
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