You stated the 'answer' to your own question in the thread title. Engineering is about making good assumptions. It's assumed that the cylinder is 'thin'.
In this case it's assumed that all the load is taken on the circuference, as you say you can use a thick walled solution (which modells the problem more accurately), it's more difficult to solve and the answers are likely to be similar. You will probably find a caveat in the book saying this is valid only when D > 10 or 20T
Say for example, that solving a full stress equation by hand takes you 10 minutes and you get an answer of 100. You could have applied an assumption and solved the problem in 5 minutes and get an answer of 95. Meaning the assumption loses you about 5% accuracy. Before doing this you need to ask yourself is the extra 5% accuracy really worth 100% extra calcualtion time.