Most of the reasoning is documented in the big comment. In short, we tried
to solve the problem with caching, but the caching should hardly be necessary
now that the bottleneck should be fixed. We'll see on production if it
actually solves the whole problem, but I've confirmed in the console that
redefining this function makes random_basic_per_species (as called during
rendering) a ton faster. And this way we keep our randomness, woo!