I agree with your point, I've probably made my considerations too quickly.

The consideration was based on the fact that returning any value previously was a misuse (without consequences) of the initializer itself.

Now the misuse would be exposed by the new implementation, probably meeting the requirements that leds to the misuse itself.

Aim of the patch is to give an alternative to the use of global variables.
Global variables usage is a pattern which might lead to code errors and many developers discourage from following it.
I do believe that forcing such pattern in order to accomplish the desired goals is quite restrictive from an API.