This was done to clean up the license and to ensure that any commercial fork of the engine has to obey the far stricter requirements concerning source distribution. The old license was compatible with GPLv2 whereas combining GPLv2 and LGPLv3 force a license upgrade to GPLv3. The license of code that originates from ZDoomGL has not been changed.
It makes no sense having them organized differently in this struct than what the rendering code needs. This saves one redundant copy operation and a function-local static variable.