More importantly than maintenance was the manufacturing issue I've already addressed. Even manual insertion of the ICs was a problem if there were parts that were rotated 180 degrees. ICs in DIP packaging always had power in the highest numbered pin and ground in the middle pin number, so if you rotated them 180 they would BLOW UP (end of the world, or at least the end of your career at that company!).
I actually know this because back then our building had a manufacturing line custom built into our facility to build our boards, we had a pick and place machine along with a wave soldering machine that was something like 1.5 ft wide and 10 ft long filled with molten solder. A board cleaning line, conformal coating line. I regularly had to help the technicians to debug any issue that came up with a new batch of boards. In some cases that was due to rotate parts that were now dead, botched rework, bent pins, missing solder, broken parts, you name it I'd probably seen it.
Like I said earlier, vision systems, registration markings, rotation capabilities, and very few if any parts handled manually, means less need for any orientation requirements, besides those for layout.