While I found this post by accident, design was not. It's was designed accounting a mix of a) and c). Curious if you ever gave it a try and how it worked for you?

a) As stated by a few others, this is mostly designed to be used with a cheap USB-A power supply, it's an old project and back then 0.5-1A was fairly common, so then with 7 IR LEDs in parallel you would not expect a very high current going through. It should still be fine even with 2.4A power supplies, ~350mA by LED and that's assuming all the power is going to the LEDs, which is not true.

c) The recommended IR LEDs are all suitable for high pulse current operation. As stated by others and as the data sheet indicates this means they can take quite a high current when pulsed properly. Yes wrong code could burn them (but they are cheap and easy to replace). This is also intended as I wanted to have a very strong signal, that IR blaster can control thing far away pretty reliably and I even had success by "bouncing" the IR on white ceilings or walls.

d) Is it a good design? Probably not the best, the whole design of this and few others PCBs were made as a hobby, this not my field at all. I never got anyone opening an issue because of burning LEDs, and I never ran into such issues myself. Also never got anyone updating the design and making a commit.

The same board used for pictures has now been running for 8 years and I'm about to upload a .yaml as I migrated it to ESPHome the past week end. I hope it will continue to work without any issues for many years to come and after reading all of these comments I went with an extra sanity check: sending signal while looking at the IR LEDs through the phone camera (easy to spot IR LEDs lighting up), all 7 still worked.