I think the author expected that creating a u16 view over a buffer up front and then writing to it would perform better than writing one-off to a single pair as

I think the author expected that creating a u16 view over a buffer up front and then writing to it would perform better than writing one-off to a single pair as a u16. If they're gonna optimize further I think they may as well go all the way through. This'll be pretty readable in the context of a binary serializer codebase b[2] = value >>> 8; b[3] = value & 0xff;