Legacy reasons. The idea was that you wouldn't need a WAL because the table itself is the log. And then you could support time-travel queries if you never cleaned up the expired tuples.
>>Max-Ga+nI
A delicated full vacuum process that need full locking, how little isolation between tables, etc
Lots of the pain point have been mitigated in the last ten years.
It is now as simple as other comparable complex db can go (i.e. Not simple, but you can't find better product)