I don't think using noops to get the parser to co-operate is that strange at all, especially not something like a makefile where whitespace is significant. It's the whole point of the `pass` noop in python: the Python grammar expects there to be something inside a loop, so if you want an empty one, you have to throw a noop in there.

Maybe there was something else there before, and it stopped working when they removed it, so they tried adding back the most minimal thing they could think of as a sanity check.