This didn't come up in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20363705 earlier this month. That "FreeBSD - A lesson in poor defaults" post said FreeBSD's OpenSSH port has "The NONE cipher is somewhat of a misfeature, removing the encryption bits and only keeping the data integrity. It allows users to accidentally shoot themselves in the foot pretty easily. The trade-off in performance isn't really worth it either, as the bottlenecks one might experience have a lot more to do with the MAC than the actual encryption."

So, when someone uses 44.0.0.0/9 where encryption isn't allowed, and they don't want to create and maintain their own OpenSSH fork, this FreeBSD code might be exactly what they want.