Jajcus

Have you ever worked with a computer with modern general-purpose OS like Linux and no RTC? It sucks. It is not strictly necessary, you can live without it, but you need workarounds for basic stuff timestamps in log files or in the file system. At least for a minute until NTP connection is established, but may be longer when internet connection is not available. And when routers are rebooted most often? When troubleshooting broken internet connection. This is also the time when properly timestamped logs could be useful.

And battery backed RTC is cheap. It doesn’t fit on a Raspberry Pi board, but can easily fit into a router case. No excuse for omitting it.

Browser and website developers see it other way: we can care about optimizations even less now.