Another place it's meaningful to use `volatile` is in benchmarking and testing: to either ensure that a block of code is run despite not having any side effects

Another place it's meaningful to use `volatile` is in benchmarking and testing: to either ensure that a block of code is run despite not having any side effects, or to ensure that a block of code that should not be run is still compiled and emitted to binary. But yes, `volatile` for what should be atomics is a clear code smell. I made quite a loud noise when I read "the code quality looks excellent" in the article.