Ah, but there is so much value in fresh eyes. Miod, who has been involved with OpenBSD development for 20 years and has surely seen those function names a thousand times, provided the historical reason (they thought they might need to allocate memory) but agreed they never ended up using that.

The fresh eyes don't have the history and are thus able to point things out that the older eyes inherently accept.

"He's the angriest man you'll ever meet. He's like a man with a fork in a world of soup." (Noel Gallagher, about his brother)

I found the quote relevant ("a man with a fork")