In contemporary practice makarasana is generally used as a place to lie still between more demanding work, much as the corpse posture is. The Gheranda Samhita does not describe it that way. The text presents it as heating, which is closer to the opposite of rest, and the only posture either surviving manual explicitly assigns to recovery is shavasana, whose stated purpose in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika is the removal of fatigue.
That difference is a small example of a general pattern. The classical corpus says remarkably little about recovery, sequencing or the management of effort across a session, because the manuals are not describing a session. They are describing a repertoire of seats and shapes, most of them intended to be held, alongside chapters on breath restraint, locks, seals and the states those practices are said to produce. The idea of a class with a shape to it, warming up and winding down, belongs to the twentieth century reorganisation of the practice that Mark Singleton documents in Yoga Body.
The atlas records the classical description and notes the modern use as a separate fact rather than reading one into the other. Where a posture's function has changed, that change is itself part of what the entry has to report, and flattening the two accounts into one would lose the most interesting thing about the entry.