More battery drain with anti-skip.
The tables have turned later on. The anti-skip would extend battery life. It would get enough buffer allowing the CD to spin-down and then it would spin back up when needed. This time could be even longer if playing MP3.

For example, my Panasonic SL-CT520 does 100 second "anti-skip" (at this point it's not really just anti-skip), and with MP3 cites up to 155h of playback time. Unfortunately, the unit I have can't play CD-RW (it is mentioned in the manual) which probably means a degraded laser.

But even with CDDA, my Sony D-EJ000 cites 16 hours with anti-skip and only 11 hours without anti-skip. Unfortunately, in this case the anti-skip also reduces audio quality slightly since it uses lossy compression, so I keep it off.
At least I think that's what the manual is trying to say

To enjoy high quality CD sound, select “G-off”.