I have written poorly worded criticisms of the OpenBSD project on HN before. They boil down to this: from my observation, it looks like the approach to security in the OpenBSD project is adding more code to solve security issues when it should be the opposite. Code is a liability. You should write as little of it as possible to solve the problem at hand and not spare a single line that isn't needed. In this case the problem is getting a shell on a remote host. Why do you need so many configuration options to solve this single problem?

The OP is a prime example of the opposite happening - it's adding code to prevent repeated authentication failures. Why would this be needed in the first place? If you have configured OpenSSH correctly (that is, using public key authentication instead of password auth, which should not even be an option), then repeated authentication failures should not be a problem. At worst, they take up some CPU time.

Much of the code in OpenBSD and the wider OpenBSD projects also address memory safety issues which would not be issues in the first place if they just used a memory safe language. Yet they push ahead using C in the full knowledge that there are better options available. Java, Go, Python, Rust, I literally don't care, anything would be better than C. Developers should not need to spend hours carefully poring over each others patches to find critical mistakes when it comes to memory. They should not need to spend hours reading C development guidelines or rely on mailing list oracles. By eliminating memory errors as a class, mental capacity is freed up to identify logic errors.