Thanks for the detailed explanation Ron. FWIW I agree that removing guards like in acpi.h makes sense.
I did a simple test: apply #pragma once to coreboot. A coreboot build for watson opens 80K .h files today. #pragma once makes barely any difference; this says we are doing a good job in how we use our .h files.
AFAIK GCC nowadays has special support to detect the usual kind of header guard that spans the whole file because it is such a common pattern, and essentially treats it like #pragma once. That may be why you saw little difference.