They may or may not, or do sometimes, etc. Certainly not in a proper and consistent way. We should have proper attribution for all “effects” and if we want to model things as memory effects that are not strictly speaking memory effects we should create special “pseudo-memory” categories.
I don’t remember what the thread was but I think my last proposal would have looked somewhat like this:
Function Attributes: sideeffects(read:globals, write:arguments, sync, maynotreturn)
define void @foo(...) { ... }
^ Agreed. Terminology is “grown” not “designed”. I don’t see a conflict/inconsistency in this particular part.