I suspect there are hundreds to thousands of such workarounds in a lot of hardware, driver and software considering the billions of lines of code they could be

I suspect there are hundreds to thousands of such workarounds in a lot of hardware, driver and software considering the billions of lines of code they could be in, much of which is proprietry. I have done quite a few workarounds that fixed odd problems but ultimately lead to worse performance once its fixed. I did my best at the time to try and limit when they applied but there is no easy way to detect the platform in a lot of cases to limit the application or to see into the future, especially when its working around a bug in the operating system and no fix has been released in any reasonable period of time. You can document them as well as you like we don't have a standard for how to deal with these types of things when it impacts common code. So I suspect there are lots of legacy workarounds causing performance degradation all over the place.