It's a heuristic (claims to be probably helpful). You might as well complain that checking string size first as part of an equality check of strings that demons

It's a heuristic (claims to be probably helpful). You might as well complain that checking string size first as part of an equality check of strings that demonstrably have a very large distribution of sizes is obviously dumb because obviously you can construct same-length strings at will. Breaking rules of thumb is the easiest thing in the world.