Partly it's a way to head off the inevitable aggressive commenters who will jump all over some detail and how it doesn't apply to some particular situation.
I think you're right in that "opinionated" seems like a shorthand for "thoughtful curation" which is the opposite of what search engines tend to turn up.
In contrast there are some list which claim to be comprehensive.
The entire value of this kind of list is its curation. Sadly, most “awesome” lists are just long lists with a firehose of items of no special quality.
Personally I get analysis paralysis pretty easily. I couldn’t even figure out what water filter to buy and lost five hours trying to find out.
As for redundancy, they're technically synonymous but "curated" has become a much abused term and more often than not these days is erroneously used to mean "amassed and presented without endorsement". So I think the redundancy adds clarity here.
I guess people just want to communicate the idea that this piece of opinionated text is biased. Of course, everything is biased, so opinionated is supposed to be redundant. So it's a signal that the author understands that they have biases, and expresses them.
EDIT: I am not contesting any downvotes, but feel free to drop a note explaining why.
If you mean the sense which means “independent”, that goes beyond tech. It was used that way by a law professor in front of the Supreme Court in 2010: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/supreme_court_word_o...
In software, its use in that way dates back at least 30 years. E.g. from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016560... (1992):
> It is shown that most of the above concepts are orthogonal, i.e., they can be implemented independently.
At that time, its use was already reasonably well established, although apparently not well enough to omit the i.e.
> The number of independent primitive concepts has been minimized in order that the language be easy to describe, to learn, and to implement. On the other hand, these concepts have been applied “orthogonally” in order to maximize the expressive power of the language while trying to avoid deleterious superfluities.
https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/A... , section 0.1.2, Orthogonality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_independence
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1536234/correlation...
Your links barely prove anything? I already knew that statistics is a fictional field.
Consider any orthogonal coordinate system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_coordinates). The whole point of orthogonality in this case is that it makes coordinate values independent of each other - varying only one coordinate cannot result in a change in any other coordinate. The term is used in this same sense in many other areas of math, and elsewhere. This is the sense in which it’s been used in software, for more than half a century.
Forgive my curiosity, but in what sense were you “originally from math” but aren’t familiar with this term beyond a high school level understanding of geometry?