No commentary on this loss either, hence asking.

FWIW, it does look like a horrible hack and it might have been more bad than good, for all I know, but it's good custom to note intent and reasoning when cleaning up stuff, in case it's presently serving good purposes.

For kicks I tracked it back to where it was added and saw it's been around since @treyhunner's original version of the plugin, 6360e7b904fcadb30678bf7fa740c998976eec75 – and reindented about four times since. O_o