What's the point of the <> button?

I know what it's for, it's meant to show an inline code snippet, but why? This site uses a rich text editor only, so there's no markup to escape parsing for. The FAQ states it'll continue to use rich text formatting only, so I'm especially confused as to why it was included in the first place. It's not even useful for code blocks spanning multiple lines, it adds backticks around each new line, and the editor strips whitespace from the beginning.

Currently, all it serves is to confuse users into thinking they're embedding HTML or something.