This doesn't reduce the quality of tests, because the flags are still
printed for declarations themselves. We only omit them in references.
However, this makes the tests more compatible with non-JVM backends
(see KT-58605), because flags of referenced stdlib declarations may
differ among target platforms.
The reason #1 for this feature is that we want to test IdSignatures
generated for declarations. Currently, there is no (easy) way to ensure
that a change in the signature building logic doesn't cause any breaking
changes wrt klibs.
Now, most IdSignatures include hashed mangled names in them, so even if
we catch a regression where the included hash changes, there would be no
way of knowing immediately what caused it, unless we'd also have mangled
names in the expectations.
The reason #2 is to test the manglers themselves. Currently, there are
no tests for them. They heavily duplicate each other, this is already
causing issues (see KT-57427) that would be very hard to catch without
these tests.
^KT-58238 Fixed
Vladimir Sukharev