I'm not saying this is the reason, but unnecessary (or sometimes dangerous if used in real life) optimizations have been created to speed up QA runs (of course, that only works if what you optimize away is not part of what you're trying to test), e.g., libeatmydata.

But for 'yes', I'd agree with you, though I guess the answer to "who cares?" is that whomever wrote it cared. They could have a legit performance reason or may just have done it to show they could.