In this example it's not the end of the world, but it would cause problems in code that's generated by other code, e.g. by macros.
I experimented for a while with having if just be aif, and it was not good. There are times you want to back off from maximally using anaphoric variants, just as there are times you don't want to use [] or ./! notation even though you could. E.g. when it's nested. And if you don't have the non-anaphoric variants, you never can.
