[unseenbastiat]

The urge to use the same flag for both B and A is probably motivated by a desire either to clean up the code by not using redundant flags. Or perhaps it was implicitly part of a forward-thinking (in theory, well intentioned) design to avoid separate flag B in the future.

Either way, it shows some attempt at longer-term thinking undone by short term implementation done improperly. That’s a microcosm of this story as a whole which gives this incident a fractal quality.