I think this particular case has two reasons the optimization makes sense; first, it's some core kernel code that possibly gets called a ton - so high performan

I think this particular case has two reasons the optimization makes sense; first, it's some core kernel code that possibly gets called a ton - so high performance code. And then second, profiling this kind of code is not easy; I don't know what tooling there is nowadays but when I was playing with Linux in the 90s each iteration would involve a reboot, and staring at printk output. So there is a tendency to write code the author thinks is faster - which may or may not be true but is probably likely for experienced developers.