[kazinator]

If you have a program which finds some order of items in order to optimize something, and then you introduce some confounding technology which scrambles the order of the items afterward, that's indistinguishable from introducing bugs into that optimizing program; the output no longer implements the optimization requirements that the program tries to ensure.

I don't see how Herbie's accuracy improvements could not be undone, if Herbie's output is fed to a back-end which doesn't preserve Herbie's order of operations as Herbie requires and depends on.