I really enjoyed the debugging process here, and am glad to have learnt about the -k flag which seems to only be available on systems with strace version 5.5, at least for me.

As for the patch (and my love for all things Frida [1]), I think a call to Intercerptor.replace() after locating the symbol with Module.getExportByName() [2] would make for a simpler patch (at the cost of installing Frida). For example:

  const sym = Module.getExportByName("lime.ndll", "SDL_SemWait");
  Interceptor.replace(sym, {
    onEnter: function() {},
    onLeave: function() {}
  });

[1] https://frida.re/

[2] https://frida.re/docs/javascript-api/#module