Also, because it badly models how the error occurred in the first place. It wasn't any one developer who made a mistake, as a comment in the thread makes clear, it was a series of mistakes, made by different people, coupled with poor documentation that ultimately led to this.

Fair enough.

Yes... but breaking similar things repeatedly.

Certainly not needless. The whole world relies on a new gcc release not to introduce new severe bugs in good code. Mistakes need to found and fixed before the release, but not 3 years after. Then the mistake becomes incompetence. I wish I would not need to sprinkle my code with

    #if defined(__GNUC__) && defined(__GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__) && \
       (((__GNUC__ == 9) && (__GNUC_MINOR__ <= 3) || \
        (__GNUC__ > 9)))

Also their arrogant attitude. Incompetence is rarely the only problem, it only gets problematic if paired with disfunctional management or arrogance.