oh the "why it's bad" part was easy. I have been thinking a lot about the "priority of constituencies" from the HTML Design Principles spec, which states

> In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity. [...] it is preferred to make things better for multiple constituencies at once.

snap is pretty clearly considering developers (who are roughly "authors" in this case) over users

w3.org/TR/html-design-principl