Using Constants For Permission Names: WHY?

I keep seeing this sort of thing in so many modules:

Am I missing something, or is this utterly pointless?

The only advantage I see is that you can change the permission string later on. But you actually can't change a permission string once you've made a release without an almighty amount of work in a hook_update_N()[*] to migrate users' existing permissions, so what is the point of using a constant apart from just creating shouty caps noise?

[*] Is there a helper function in core yet for migrating permission names during updates? There really should be.