It especially seems religious to me because it's saying that somehow "/ 2" is simpler than ">> 1" because it has one less character for the symbol, and because

It especially seems religious to me because it's saying that somehow "/ 2" is simpler than ">> 1" because it has one less character for the symbol, and because division is a more commonly known operator to most people than bitwise shifting. It seems to me that they are equally simple if we assume that programmers dealing with low level or performance intensive code know what a bitwise shift is and ignore the extra character, then they are literally equivalently complicated expressions with 1 symbol and 1 value applied to the symbol.