Hi, for me `guix system reconfigure` inevitably needs sudo, so i'm not actually running it under my user (where i regularly guix pull). So the guix checkout of root is most likely older, hence i find it useful that it first pulls. guix pull only updates the guix checkout for the current user and while i have seen patches allowing to share a single checkout with multiple users this isn't the default and has its own disadvantages.
mfg^2