As the commit message was "Fix HTTPS protocol support in torrent/rss downloader" I suppose it was a quick fix to make things work, and as things worked no one ever took a look at it until now.
EDIT:
The author of the PR[0] (who is one of the top qBittorrent contributors according to GitHub[1]) that fixed this also came to this conclusion:
> I presume that it was a quick'n'dirty way to get SSL going which persisted to this day. It's also possible that back in the day Qt4 (?) didn't support autoloading ca root certificates from the OS's store.
EDIT: The author of the PR[0] (who is one of the top qBittorrent contributors according to GitHub[1]) that fixed this also came to this conclusion:
> I presume that it was a quick'n'dirty way to get SSL going which persisted to this day. It's also possible that back in the day Qt4 (?) didn't support autoloading ca root certificates from the OS's store.
[0]: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/pull/21364 [1]: https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/graphs/contributo...