> I assume there is some place that notices that the while condition is a constant, and therefore doesn't need to be explicitly evaluated?

To answer your question: yes, and it's unrelated to both peephole optimizer and to the above mentioned grand refactoring of the ceval loop :)  But if we add "-X noopt" (or equivalent) we can disable those micro-optimizations too.

Let's track this in https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/9693