I did explicitly mention that it might not be a good idea, though this is an exaggerated case since situations like these realistically constitute a very small portion of actual codebases.

But a sibling comment [0] did provide an example that would give a much simpler approach to accomplishing the same thing in this particular instance, with zero extra lines and runtime complexity.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822657