[yuriks]

It sounds like the main motivation for the conversion was to simplify builds and reduce the chance of security issues. Old parts of protocols that no one pays much attention to anymore does seem to be a common place where those pop up. The performance gain looks more like just a nice side effect of the rewrite, I imagine they were at most targeting performance parity.

[spartanatreyu]

Exactly, even if we can't remove "that one dependency" (https://xkcd.com/2347/), we can reinforce everything that uses it.