This seems like a pattern with any body part that is basically a little dead-end pocket (tonsils, gall bladders, appendices, sinuses) – the popular wisdom is “you don’t need that cos it doesn’t do anything”, based on an early-20th-century engineering mindset where things are understood as a flowchart where everything has inputs, outputs and a self-contained Function. That thinking is not well-equipped to understand little gnarls and curlicues that passively modulate the working of the overall system.
It’s the same thinking that leads people to persistently dismiss (for example) the economic importance of unwaged labor or the arts. Most real science and engineering has moved past thinking like this, but I think the public cling to it because it justifies authoritarian, daddy-centric hierarchies.
