[badlucklottery]

> especially on a N64 cartridge to save space?

The space obviously wasn't needed during development (this is leaked source, I don't know if it made it to the gold version) so there's two likely possibilities:

a) They knew about it but didn't have the dev/tester time to vet the change. This is coming from an era when most game testing was done manually and the N64 toolchain had some big issues around launch. Higher priority fixes might have just pushed a cleanup task like this off the list.

b) They just didn't know. This is also from an era where DCVS weren't particularly common in the games industry and CVS was still black magic in some circles so auditing changes or doing code reviews were very rare.