The reasoning there would be that you could use bitwise operations to mask inputs from two vectors into one (think vectorized conditional move), which effective

The reasoning there would be that you could use bitwise operations to mask inputs from two vectors into one (think vectorized conditional move), which effectively allows you to easily achieve performant branch predication. However, you can trivially achieve this the normal way by including simple instructions that allow you to select or combine vector inputs. If that's not a path they want to go down, it's also doable to take a slight performance hit and achieve the same with the use of multiplication instructions.