> Can you provide a description of what motivated you to change the behavior or what benefits this change would have for you or others?

Sometimes, you wish to copy a whole directory from a read-only file system and you don't want it to be read-only in the destination.

> Do you know why others haven’t reported this need previously?

On NixOS all of the files that belong to packages are read-only. I encountered the need for this feature in GNURadio, at:

https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/pull/5227

The following Stack overflow question also suggests the need for this functionality is a bit common:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/17022146/4935114