Yeah curious why more people didn't notice that strange phrasing. Not sure what the point of it was. Did they make more mistakes and therefore fix more of them?

My guess here is that fixing those syntactic "mistakes" really means changing the code so it does the same thing, refactoring if you will.

I catch myself doing this sometimes when I'm tired or disengaged - spending my time on pointless refactoring or gold-plating. Presumably because these things are easier than what I should be tackling, but trick me into feeling productive.