This value is never read, so this assignment is meaningless and will be optimized away at compile time.

Is it really so? ;)

In general, we try to not encourage PRs like this. As you already pointed out, in most of these cases the compiler will optimise it away anyway, so the CI, review, and Git history churn is (in most cases) not worth it.

I'm sure you can find a lot of interesting bugs to work on in the issue tracker :)

Moreover, we try really hard to avoid the skip issue label. See the devguide for more details :)

Is it really so? ;)

It is. I just ran clang static analyzer on that file.

Before tearing down Chesterton's Fence, take a look and try to find out why a specific line of code was introduced in the first place. I find git log -L:funcname:filename to be a useful tool for this.

IMO, keeping dead code is a very strange decision anyway.