Comment by yubblegum

Not sure what is the puzzle here: the most likely explanation is that Holt himself had very narrow historic knowledge of the provenance of the design he had learned off when doing oscilloscope power supply design, told his boss Jobs, and he then just repeated like a parrot what Holt told him.

Contemporary example would be a ceo who will repeat the hallucination of an LLM as fact and then some guy on the internet will spend days refuting it.