Right, but that isn't the argument that was being used here, which is my point. The way I read it, the contractor cared only enough to get the design over the line so the customer would sign off on it. Their argument was that you shouldn't care about leaks due to scheduled deconstruction, not because of a technical consideration.

There exist options between no reclaim and using a garbage collector which could be considered, depending on the exact technical specifications of the hardware it was running on and the era in which it happened.

But retrofitting technical reasoning about why this may have been done is superfluous. The contractor already said why they did it, and the subtext of the original post is that it was flippant and hilarious.