A masked load or store will load a potentially unknown size of bytes from a memory location - that is not generally known at compile time. They do not necessarily load/store the entire vector width, and treating them as such can lead to incorrect aliasing information (for example, if the underlying object is smaller than the size of the vector).
This makes sure that the MMO is given an unknown size to represent this. which is less accurate that "may load/store from up to 16 bytes", but less incorrect that "will load/store from 16 bytes".