> It's fine to say "we did our best to understand this and as far as we can tell, these genes are not utilized" to go like "yeah it's junk" is quite different.

That’s not how junk DNA was defined. Junk DNA regions have no coding regions. No genes. There’s no easily recognized feature or pattern that would allow you to derive or even propose a function, despite decades of advances in the area. In this particular example the analogy with computer code won’t take you far.