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The nice thing about temp files is that the OS will eventually remove them, even if you don't

Only if Cron is set up to do it. I have hosts without /tmp and /var/tmp clearance and they have data states which persist across reboot.

with UNIX/POSIX systems it pays to say "it depends" often.

macOS does it on reboot, not sure if it inherited this from BSD proper

FreeBSD comes with a "periodic" script to do it daily, but it's not enabled by default.

There's this idea that macOS is "based on BSD", but that's not really the case in any meaningful way; it took some components, but the system overall isn't really "based on it" as such.

That's fair, but a storage space specially treated as at least theoretically "ephemeral" should be cleared out on some regular basis before things start depending on it NOT being cleared out.

That said, it makes sense that at least some distros would leave a job in place to do so but initially disabled so that the user can decide based on the use-case

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