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I guess there is a discussion that floats around the internet every once and a while that attempts to backronym the/usr directory as unix system resources directory when really it is just what Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie called the bucket for all user space directories when they mounted a second drive.

The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this, a
1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades by
bureaucrats who never question why they're doing things.

The whole listserv message is a good history of how these directories came to be and how bureaucracy has propagated that forward.