I mean that it's often difficult to take older projects like this and properly replicate the environment with all dependencies.
The point about the C used in the kernel drifting could be relevant, but with this sort of project I'm more concerned initially with reproducing results and then moving forward.
> Should I worry?
> If you have secrets on virtual machines with shared hardware (e.g., in the cloud), you should be aware of the issue. But it’s not good for your health to worry too much.
More likely (though malware can contribute to this) they just can't justify the cost. There's always going to be a terse response that someone could build one in an afternoon and a $5 Digital Ocean VM, but bandwidth costs can be significant at scale.
Twitter doubled their character limits in a tweet while Twitter users adopted the concept of multiple tweets to form a thread. No other services (to my knowledge) impose character limits that would require url shortening.