> there is still no obvious need for it

There's need if your apt client hits a redirector that redirects to a mirror close-by. That's the default for Kali Linux, so it's very much needed.

This being said Debian's default deb.debian.org is a CDN, so maybe disabling redirects by default in Debian, and letting downstream distros enable if if needed, might be a good idea.

However when you change a long-standing setting like that, hard to know in advance what will break...

And as others noted, mirror sysadmins might use redirects in their webserver config. So if you disable the setting, users that hit a mirror might face apt errors, that can be a lot of users impacted.