Which circumstances do "not any sense at all" imply? 

Should the expression 'strlen("RSSI")' be passed for the parameter 'length' instead?

I suggest to fix this since it is indeed a bug,

We can agree that this function implementation was broken for a while there.

instead of doing "micro optimizations" - which is the last thing that code in the staging area 
needs (as IIRC you have already been told by others, including the staging maintainer).

The acceptance might grow a bit more for such software fine-tuning
(like refactoring around variable usage).

Regards,
Markus