More layers of obfuscation. For example in order to be able to attribute the backdoor to a different party.
It is of course also possible that Lasse Collins is a nice real person who just has not been able to review this. Maybe he is too ill,or has to care for an ill spouse, or perhaps he is not even alive any more. Who knows him as a person (not just an account name) and knows how he is doing?
They don't even need plausible deniability, groups like the NSA have been caught spying on everyone and it doesn't hurt them all that much. The publicity isn't ideal. But it only confirms what we already new - turns out the spies are spying on people! Who knew.
There are probably dozens if not hundreds of this sort of attempt going on right now. I'd assume most don't get caught. Or go undetected for a many years which is good enough enough. If you have government money on the budget, it makes sense to go with large-volume low-effort attempts rather than try some sort of complex good-cop-bad-cop routine.
But to establish a significant contributor to a key piece of software, not unlike xz, is an ideal position for a state actor. The developer doesn't even need to know who/why, but they could be financially/ideologically aligned. This is what intelligence officers do. They manage real human assets who exist naturally. But to have someone long-established as an author of a project is the exact type of asset they want. Even if they push the code, people immediately start considering how it could have been done by someone else. Yes, it's conspiratorial/paranoid thinking but there's nothing more paranoid than state intelligence trade craft.
https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=commit;h=f9cf4c05edd14de...