Yikes, I don't see any legitimate use for this, other than hacking for the sake of hacking. Interesting read though.
It's used extensively to (for example) add debugging or tracing to functions in libraries or to sanitize certain code path. At work, we were able to kill off jndi from Log4J to prevent Log4Shell within hours of the announcement this way while waiting for updates of thousands of dependencies.
(I suppose Rust is arguably an exception to this; thin runtime, but there's a lot of things the replaced function could do that would still blow Rust up if the rest of the code isn't compiled and correctly optimized to account for whatever the new code does.)