Trying to differentiate GNU implementations had nothing to do with it. This is never a consideration for me. It was worth the slight increase in complexity for

Trying to differentiate GNU implementations had nothing to do with it. This is never a consideration for me. It was worth the slight increase in complexity for the reasons stated in the commit message. Also an unmentioned point is that the coreutils code is very often referenced, so should be as robust and performant as possible, so those properties may percolate elsewhere.