The 17.0 major release is coming on May 16, 2024! This version brings many exciting improvements to GitLab, but also removes some deprecated features. We are introducing three breaking change windows during which we expect breaking changes to be deployed to GitLab.com. You can read more about it on our blogpost. The first breaking change window begins 2024-04-22 09:00UTC and ends 2024-04-24 22:00UTC.
The primary motivation is to communicate more to the developer, but this can also allow the compiler to eliminate the occasional virtual dispatch. (I don't know whether it actually does for any case here.)