That's done throughout all Emacs addons: basically its text-modification API seems to have been constructed backwards from what's available to the user and the UI, instead of the other way around, and depends a lot on the cursor position. Even the more-or-less popular string library ‘s’ is a third-party addon. So Org pretty much went on with the common practice here.

With the volume of addon development that Emacs managed to get, it's a quite solid case of ‘worse is better, but you're now stuck with the worse for your life’.