Why is power-in on the board two large pads?

I’m curious why pads are used instead of through-holes. Seems like these would not be as durable.

The big pads on April are for soldering a battery pack to. These also have reverse voltage protection.

If you want through-hole, VIN and GND are available on the edge of the board - these feed into the DCDC in the same way, except there’s no reverse voltage protection on these inputs.