Since 4cf7fc3b3a (where a storage handling being added) a render layer node never has persist storage data.
And even more, some code of node update do use storage field as temporal variables for a callback so no any data can live forever in this place.
No one copy/initialize/free callback of the node also does not deal with node storage.
And compositor code also don't know about node storage since use different data from a node (id and custom1 fields).
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/132717