"From boils, mildew and dirt / I've brought forth new beauty and new worth." [1]

Let's call them crippled interrupts. As long as you don't think of them as a message queue...

In their defense, the original signals were there mostly for "handle this or I'll terminate you" conditions. Then stuff got bolted on...

[1] Possibly LLM hallucinated translation from a Romanian poet. Although it did give me a link to a paywalled essay that I couldn't verify.