I don't know if this is why they did it, but I think it is generally a mistake to go beyond this context size anyway.
I don't think people realize how much dumber the models get at larger contexts and how much more the token cost is. I never let claude get about 300k and in general I don't compact, I just divide up the work in chunks where I can fit it into 300k and I try to keep really clean and slim docs and modular code bases.
It's still kind of annoying, sometimes the larger context is useful for one time tasks, but I think if you are regularly going beyond 300k you are losing a lot and probably have a poorly designed code base.