I never heard someone say they liked not seeing chat when they pressed escape but maybe there are some benefits Im missing. Feel free to discuss that.
Rendering chat when loading a map is obviously bad in my opinion though. (and it was caused because of me )
I have no idea why it was hardcoded to 64 if the MAX_NAME_LENGTH is 16. I thought maybe this is used for the colon ":" in chat or something but I tested ingame and all worked fine.