Unused End-of-Life runtimes get removed automatically now (as of 1.9.1), but the answer is a bit more nuanced than that, especially if there are multiple users on the same system (that could have user-specific flatpaks that use system runtimes).
It could also benefit users that have more disk space than bandwidth (I was in that situation for a while, though a mechanism for sharing runtimes with LAN peers would be nice).