Except there's always that nagging feeling in the back of a programmer's head that says, I might need that later.

Silly as it may be with things like git around, I can recall thinking, "maybe we will run this on AIX..." when hacking on a multi-OS shell script.

Not good practice to leave the bloat in, but at least give developers the benefit of the doubt that it isn't outright magic to them.

The part about how people "copied an existing init script or thought ... that init scripts needed LSB headers that looked like this" sounded like it to me.

I didn't initially manage to follow the right sequence of links to find the example[1], but now that I have, the context seems to be that "System V init ignores all of these" (the parts people copied without understanding), so the description still looks applicable to that example. (They serve no purpose at the point in time when they're added by cargo-cultists but cause problems much later when someone/something assumes that they are actually meaningful.)

[1] http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdAndSysV...

In other words, you're willing to try and try to find a way to convince yourself you're not wrong despite having it explained to you already.

good day.