It also selects for developers who deliberately code up to the limit of what the runtime will allow, regardless of the obvious fact that having code like this is like sprinkling landmines across your product.
PS: I worked with code from the 1984 Macintosh days that was still in use in 2005. You could see where people had updated from Motorola 68020 to PPC and if it had not been stripped out some poor coder might have updated the remaining ASM to x86.