According to https://github.com/openssl/openssl/issues/5117, it is considered deprecated and is disabled by default upstream (which I confirmed in the Configure). It seems that it was originally conditional on USE=bindist, but after the patents most likely expired it was unconditionally enabled. Probably the best move is to remove it from the ebuild and use the openssl defaults.
3.0 essentially does this for us IIRC.