How does "treated like any vulgar scalar" differ from "no longer treated specially"?

Sorry, you're right—aside from the fact that the former is funny and the latter isn't, not at all. :-)

I remembered only “commutativity breakage” and “vulgar scalar”, and completely forgot about the bit in between:

code references are no longer treated specially when appearing on the left of the ~~ operator

so that I didn't realise what it was that you were claiming was redundant.