Question about aspect implementation function signature

[shayanhoshyari]

I am relatively new to Bazel (I do have extensive experience with an in-house artifact based build system). I have been reading through aspects. And saw the following function signature:

https://bazel.build/rules/lib/globals/bzl.html#parameters_1

implementation function; required
A Starlark function that implements this aspect, with exactly two parameters: Target (the target to which the aspect is applied) and ctx (the rule context which the target is created from). Attributes of the target are available via the ctx.rule field. This function is evaluated during the analysis phase for each application of an aspect to a target.

And ctx.rule says
https://bazel.build/rules/lib/builtins/ctx#rule

Rule attributes descriptor for the rule that the aspect is applied to. Only available in aspect implementation functions.

My question is what was the motivation behind this two inconsistent ways of passing information about the current rule to the function? For the "target" part, an extra argument is used. Whereas, for the rule_attributes part, it is attached to the ctx.