[djmips]

The latency notwithstanding, you can implement a counter with an LFSR that hits every unique value in a 2^n-1 sequence with less transistors than a standard counter.

[userbinator]

This is the reason. LFSRs are much simpler to implement, and in those days, every transistor saved was very important.

Some early microprocessors used LFSRs instead of a regular counter for their instruction pointer register for this reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8375577