I feel like modern compilers would turn their nose up at that shit. “Dead code? Ewww! No way I’m letting that into my syntax tree!”

A lot of IDEs would probably throw a warning about unreachable code.

implying that any developer actually reads warnings

most of my (rust) projects have zero warnings, unless I’m in the middle of working on a feature

First thing I do on my projects is enable warnings as errors and increase my warning levels when reasonable.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said on the projects I work on at work. Drives me crazy that we get likes 300+ warnings whenever we run the app and that we can’t change it because "they’re just warnings*.