that's kind of annoying. at the same time, this also underscores the issue of usability. why not alias "--help" to "help"?
yes, i know even critical open source projects are extremely underfunded. perversely, the lack of funding meant that there weren't enough people to review code, which meant contributing was difficult - at least according to this article from 2014 shortly after heartbleed: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-...
Note that part of the problem is the erroneous assumption that "--help" is ubiquitous. It isn't, in practice. It's a GNUism that one does not find very often in the BSD world.