Depends on D18904. Ref T13043. If an attacker compromises a victim's session and bypasses their MFA, they can try to guess the user's current account password by making repeated requests to change it: if they guess the right "Old Password", they get a different error than if they don't.
I don't think this is really a very serious concern (the attacker already got a session and MFA, if configured, somehow; many installs don't use passwords anyway) but we get occasional reports about it from HackerOne. Technically, it's better policy to rate limit it, and this should reduce the reports we receive.