I wondered the same thing when setting up OCSP stapling. My conclusion was that the largest benefit is to the issuer, because OCSP allows them to use a differen

I wondered the same thing when setting up OCSP stapling. My conclusion was that the largest benefit is to the issuer, because OCSP allows them to use a different private key for initial issuance and for status responses. So the issuing key could be stored with much stricter security. OTOH I assume that in reality half the world's CAs store their signing keys in an Access database on an unpatched Windows XP laptop, so it may be moot.