It may have been inspired by arguments like https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html (although that one was published five years later than the change we're talking about).

That would be rather misguided though. It's not like a device is going to know the exact time the interrupt handler routine would run, hash it, and go back "whoops, better not fire an interrupt yet because it won't be on the right tick!"