My best useless use of dd was in the Ubuntu 16.04 days.

I was at a satellite office with all windows PCs for the day, so used a live disk to get a decent environment to get things done. Only problem was that the DVD drive kept spinning down and every time I did something that was not cached it made me wait forever.

nohup + while loop + sleep 4s + raw dd read from CD for the win :)

EDIT: Reading this article it sounds like dd has no "special" ability to access the disk in a raw way. But surely that's what the nocache option is for...