I meant the other poster when saying something about it on LWN. LWN authors are awesome. They usually investigate, ask around, etc.
Regarding this, this change indeed happened a month ago in a development version. Seems they like to play with things in a development release, then try various things. Similar thing happened with Nautilus. However in this case it seems they had no idea yet what they wanted to do just that they wanted to do something. Anyway, that is my impression. Thing was quickly reverted, then since yesterday Slashdot claimed things, while nothing happened since.