>I am sure those would have been autoclaved and reprocessed at some ridiculous pH value, no?

Probably not until they had reason to do so.

"Hot acidic environment" is hell when it comes to corrosion and the engineering incentive for medical stuff is only to be as corrosion resistant as you need because there are other design considerations and the most corrosion resistant stainless steels are not the bet fit for building a super precise needle you're gonna poke around in someone's eye so you wind up wanting to pick a middle ground alloy. Picking a middle ground alloy puts a hard limit on what you can do to clean your instruments before you degrade them in unacceptably short order.

I don't know how things have changed since. My medical manufacturing experience is out of date and limited.