Who gives a shit about the "smell test"? You are just talking out of your ass, that's the smell. You keep asserting that it needs to be fixed, but there is nothing to support that. If it's not the system of record, then it's irrelevant.

A null record is nothing but a lack of data. The front end systems typically handle that by showing no information or N/A. Elon's clowns were not going through the front end systems. Depending how you query COBOL based systems, which these likely are, an empty record will come back as a 0, which COBOL interprets as the begining of it's date system, which is in 1875.

With that, I'm done talking to you like you are a genuine human making the best interpretation you can. You are a partisan hack with an agenda who will glom on to any interpretation of realty that can be bent to your purposes.