Nice find. You may be correct that it wasn't intentional due to the lack of documentation around the change, but I do note they updated tests for the refactored function [1], and the tests clearly show different behaviour from the original implementation [2].
I'm surprised this wasn't picked up during code review. Also surprised no unit tests for the original implementation, just the new one - if you're going to refactor something, add tests for the original implementation if there aren't any already.
Who gets promoted faster: The person who spends an extra hour or two on every code review investigating the behavior of hacky wrappers 50-year-old awkward file APIs, looking for the one and 100 critical security bug? Or The person who gets more features launched?
I'm surprised this wasn't picked up during code review. Also surprised no unit tests for the original implementation, just the new one - if you're going to refactor something, add tests for the original implementation if there aren't any already.
[1] https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks...
[2] https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks...