I can only speak from my own experiences, but I have found commit messages extremely helpful, when they explain the "why" of the change. And as unfortunate as it is, many of us also have to work with unreadable codebases.
No, they say they are not going to store a bitmap in a texture, which is not the same thing as embedding directly in the shader code.
You could compare that to storing some data in a separate file which needs to be read during runtime versus embedding the data directly in the source code.
Portal has been working for us, but storage accounts have been unreachable from certain regions for the past 30 minutes. Possibly Portal is also broken in the same regions.