This is a great story/summary, and it underlines the value of being able to "hear from" the code's original author (either by contacting them, or preferably by referring to high-quality documentation saying "this looks stupid, here's why").

I've had the joy of seeing code which broke completely if you removed the line while(false){}. Some hideous synchronization bug was solved by this line, and while it obviously wasn't the right solution, simply deleting it produced bad outputs. Profilers and processing tools are, as you say, other likely causes of dumb-looking code choices.

The stupider the "error", the more suspicion you should assign to its presence in any half-decent code.