You aren't wrong given the current development landscape but Emacs is a very old piece of software and this sort of thing wasn't unheard of when it first was gi

You aren't wrong given the current development landscape but Emacs is a very old piece of software and this sort of thing wasn't unheard of when it first was given life. (I wasn't really around but anecdotal stories from the time period seem to support this.) This is just an example of technical debt handled well actually. The loan came due and now the emacs devs are doing the right thing and paying it off.