Haha, I don't know how folks found this, but I actually did make it for a real-world use case. While doing large-scale builds of debian packages [1], occasionally I'd have parts of the build process hang (usually some test that I didn't care about). I didn't want the whole build to fail, so I needed some way to kill the process but have it return 0 so that make and friends wouldn't think anything was amiss.

Also, credit where credit is due -- the original idea was suggested to me by Kyle Huey: https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1484342467205816325

[1] https://moyix.blogspot.com/2022/02/on-building-30k-debian-pa...