[morelisp]

Aside from the performance implications being very real (even today, the best first step to micro-optimize is usually to kill/merge/right-size as many allocations as possible), up through ~2015 the dominant consoles still had very little memory and no easy way to compact it. Every single non-deterministic malloc was a small step towards death by fragmentation. (And every deterministic malloc would see major performance gains with no usability loss if converted to e.g. a per-frame bump allocator, so in practice any malloc you were doing was non-deterministic.)