Yes, this current behaviour was introduced by the original Bourne shell and then it stuck for some silly reason or another (it probably has some fringe use case

Yes, this current behaviour was introduced by the original Bourne shell and then it stuck for some silly reason or another (it probably has some fringe use cases but they elude me). Thompson's original shell, or rather, /etc/glob, at various versions implemented the mix of behaviours that would later be reintroduced as nullglob and failglob options in Bash.