Hmm... I've read about "Reflections on Trusting Trust" a couple times including in college some twenty years ago, though never the paper itself.

I have never seen the actual examples before, but the way it's always been described to me I kind of expected more...

It was always described as completely undetectable... so my assumption was one could not find it even with a decompiler and a lot of free time...

I guess I expected for instance it to filter patterns of itself out of fread for instance, such that a system built with it literally could not detect its existence at all. I expected it to make the operating system at large lie to you.