Empty output after HTML tag closure - '</div>', '');

Question

I've always wondered if these empty outputs were made by design, or something was deleted from there and just forgotten to be removed.

Example:

$this->output('</div> <!-- END qa-main -->', '');

^{qa-theme-base.php#L766}

Comments

Probably the latter, since output() calls output_array(), which AFAICS would then drop empty strings.