Who controls glibc?

Fixing small things should only require small reasons. If you have to think very carefully for days, consult dozens of people, do a cost-benefit analysis and write up an extensive rationale document every time you clean up a bit of code or a bit of documentation, it clearly won't be worth the effort. Then the project will collapse under the combined weight of a million tiny problems that nobody bothered fixing.

Efficiently fixing trivial issues seems like a requirement for sustainable software development, not a sign of its demise. (And it sounds like this patch was being handled efficiently until Stallman got involved). Sometimes projects will explicitly talk about paper cuts (minor usability bugs that are individually unimportant, but a user who encounters dozens of them will be strongly put off) and technical debt (problems that weren't worth fixing in the short term, but their cost will accumulate until they seriously impede development) because they're aware they need to deal with those minor issues - it's tempting to ignore them and focus on the highest-priority issues instead, but it's important for the project's long-term health to work on the little things too.

(Besides, in this specific case it's easy to find people like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48445031/why-would-it... who seem genuinely confused by the statement and wasted an appreciable amount of time trying to understand it, so it's not a hypothetical problem.)