Totally disagree. In a technology with a long history, especially one that never breaks backwards-compatibility, a whole lot of things seem nonsensical without context. And this isn't just relevant for apologetic purposes: seeing and internalizing the patterns and the internal logic often requires that background knowledge.

Think about when you're learning to work on a legacy system. You (hopefully) don't just learn the current state of the system in a vacuum. You go through and learn the history of decisions and constraints that got it there, the layer upon layer of changes that resulted in the end result in front of you.