Fairly sure GPU drivers do the same thing where they include a ton of per game tweaks to make them run faster. It does feel like a fragile way of doing things where an external component that should be agnostic to the software running ends up including a handful of junk trying to fix stuff that should have been fixed by the consumer of the driver.

It goes the other way too, sometimes you trigger some optimization silliness in the driver and the game needs to adapt to avoid it.

The big one I remember was many applications, not just games assuming the buffer swap was performed by a blit into the display buffer, not an framebuffer pointer update. They relied on the previous frames data still being in the back buffer. For those applications you were forced to blit the buffer, not swap the pointer and take a performance hit.

I also remember a media player being called out by name in the code for doing invalid operations, needing a work around and code to detect it was running just to function.