Having genesis balances for precompiles it not required for any particular use cases.
Removing them however have a benefit of improve testability of some edge cases that happened in the wild on Mainnet and probably other networks.
The test case it enables is to send eth eth to a previously "empty account" precompiles. If all precompiles account have a genesis balance, it's not possible to test this case.
Over Discord, it seems this was to align more with some other clients, for extra context.