In old school ML a pathological solution is often a collapse of some kind due to an underspecified objective. Maybe one parameter explodes or the model predicts "0" for everything

I read this as "the code is working as intended but the bug is an artifact of the original design"

I genuinely have no idea what it is meant to mean in the context it uses it. Load-bearing etc is annoying but roughly understandable, some of the opus5 classics are completely out there.

I'm a native English speaker as well, I shudder to think what a second language speaker would do (even if they were very confident with the language!).