[QUESTION] Why empty settings is omitted as nil

[cangyin]

Hello team! I am customizing clickhouse-operator, where there is a need to generate interserver_http_host setting for each host, but the host.Settings field is nil by default, as seen here:

clickhouse-operator/pkg/model/chi/normalizer.go

Lines 1423 to 1427 in df26023

	func (n *Normalizer) normalizeConfigurationSettings(settings *api.Settings) *api.Settings {
	if settings == nil {
	//settings = api.NewSettings()
	return nil
	}

in commit d372baf

Though I can simply un-comment it, but I am a afraid of breaking some other logic behind the commit. So why empty settings are omitted as nil here?