nothin’ like good ol’ job security?
But also, it makes the stakes far lower on these patches which are an “anti feature” – that is, no one particularly wants any restrictions on what transactions could be valid beyond what’s needed to mitigate DoS attacks. Auto-repeal is nice because if we discover DoS A and mitigate it with patch P, and then later discover DoS B, patching B with some patch Q while P is active might be much more difficult than coming up with P’ that covers both A and B.