While debugging #13535 I noticed the following inconsistency in CSE:

Note [CSE for INLINE and NOINLINE] states that we need to take care when adding expressions bound to binders with inline pragmas to the CSEnv. To see why, consider the following,

{-# NOINLINE bar #-}
bar = <rhs>     -- Same rhs as foo

foo = <rhs>

Given this program, we need to avoid producing foo = bar since doing so would mean that we would lose the ability to inline foo's original RHS.

The note then goes on to give the following rule,

We should not add

<rhs> :-> bar

to the CSEnv if bar has any constraints on when it can inline; that is, if its 'activation' not always active. Otherwise we might replace <rhs> by bar, and then later be unable to see that it really was <rhs>.

This rule is implemented in noCSE with,

  not (isAlwaysActive (idInlineActivation id))

However, it's quite unclear to me that this rule avoids the issue we set out to solve. Afterall, NOINLINE bar is always active, but it still means that rewriting foo to foo=bar would lose us the ability to see foo's original RHS.