This was useful when plugins first started upgrading to uuid because each plugin would implement their own way for grabbing uuid's from mojang. Because none of them shared the result they would quickly hit the limits on the api causing the conversion to either fail or pause for long periods of time. The global api cache was a (very hacky) way to force all plugins to share a cache but caused a few issues with plugins that expected a full implementation of the HTTPURLConnection. Due to the fact that most servers/plugins have updated now it seems to be a good time to remove this as its usefulness mostly has expired.