I think it’s a very shrewd use of that history: their goal was to get a potential reviewer to ignore it and pretty everyone qualified to look at that code has s

I think it’s a very shrewd use of that history: their goal was to get a potential reviewer to ignore it and pretty everyone qualified to look at that code has seen those specific values enough to likely tune it out as more tabs vs. spaces noise or perhaps think the original test case started with a file corrupted by some whitespace conversion process, which would be a very easy explanation since very similar things have legitimately happened to other projects. Whoever did this shows signs of being very familiar with programming culture and I’d bet that this was another deliberate attempt to hide in the background noise.