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I suspect for consistency with ggplot - the same reason why ‘aes’ is shorthand and everyone forgets that it stands for “aesthetic”.

Thanks, that makes sense. I actually just parsed aes as related to encryption without even considering how weird that was given the contect.

I get it – in my (limited) opinion, there's a lot that's quirkily (but avoidably) named about ggplot and the surrounding R ecosystem in general.