I've read another theory: It's because of the sun damage to their eye from using a sextant for navigation. Haven't been able to confirm it though.
It's amazing how much of our conscious experience is hallucination, and yet a lot of people are disparaging LLMs for doing just the same...
Optical illusions are evidence of the pile of hacks that our senses and our consciousness use to make sense of the world. I think it is really difficult to fully disengage from the biases this induces, and we are sadly best at perceiving such flaws in others. This might be one of the reasons why humans have to socialize with other humans to maintain mental health.