Agreed. And, the persistence of bad data like this isn't uncommon. We had a bunch of fields in the SQL registry system I work in set to the literal 4 character

Agreed. And, the persistence of bad data like this isn't uncommon. We had a bunch of fields in the SQL registry system I work in set to the literal 4 character ascii string "null" because of a coding error over field == null by somebody. It did no harm to the attributes of interest at the time. It only had consequences later on when the codebase changed.