They are not BS reasons, they are just reasons you don’t like. The OpenBSD team - those behind OpenSSH - are very conservative to the point of being almost reactionary, and that’s great for the kind of software they make. OpenBSD defines itself as “boring”, in a good way.
Coming from a Linux world it may seem weird, as around Linux innovation is praised more than improvement so we end up with a bunch of shiny new software with a lot of growing pains, while BSDs tend to be avantgarde on some technical aspects but at the same time very wary of novelty. OpenBSD in particular takes this to the next level with most of development still happening on CVS and many other quirks that would baffle most Linux users.
To each their own. Personally when it’s security stuff I like it boring. I’ve been using openssh since version 2.x and the muscle memory built 20 years ago is still serving me.
Edit: just to be clear, for ssh Linux is a second class citizen. On our distros we run a special (less secure) “portable” version of ssh that they release for us poor peasants. OpenSSH is an OpenBSD tool first, everything else after.
Well yes, after breaking countless tools with repercussions possibly in the decade range, punching security holes in systems that were hardened with certain expectations (my head aches at the amount of “lol the admin didn’t restrict .config/ssh”) - after all this havoc we will have a native bsd server software that finally complies with a Linux desktop standard. I don’t see downsides to this.