Good point, didn't know that. Figured it was a cheeky dev.

The funny part that people start to forget is that this version of snippet was introduced when original one (ga.js) was blocked by most of the world (back in the days when Firefox became browser number one and Adblock Plus was in use).

New snipped was designed to break Adblock Plus, which was unable to block inline scripts (and simple blocking analytics.js caused js failures in the same script block). So it was malicious dark pattern. Obviously eventually it was bypassed, which required fake replacements like https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/src/web_access...