I don't think it is so black and white. The original authors made trade offs that made sense at the time, but in the intervening period the context has changed

I don't think it is so black and white. The original authors made trade offs that made sense at the time, but in the intervening period the context has changed and those trade offs don't necessarily make sense. The parents point is obviously exaggerated, but currently disk is cheap and the cost of inscrutable code, especially code that is run by millions or even billions of people, is extremely high: bugs are harder to spot and harder to fix, the barrier to entry for new maintainers is high, new features are harder to add etc.