It's hilarious to see the things which were hard coded in the first BSD implementation, like a 4 KiB socket buffer size.
Also, as far as I can see, Bill Joy DID actually have linear backoff but it was hidden behind an always-false condition, so his hand-written lesser float backoffs were chosen instead. This seems like a fairly tragic coding error to me.
I have code like that. A return then some body of sane looking but outcome unknown code.
I use git to sync work between multiple computers, and I want to be able to sync work-in-progress code that should absolutely never see the light of day, so I feel like committing and pushing it to a WIP branch is fine.
Even if you only use one computer, I think it's a good idea to push these things so that if your HDD fails you can pick back up where you left off, even if it's code that's not ready to actually merge yet.