My guess would be that it's an automated build / deploy system that required some addon installed to run, so they had to run `devenv /build` instead of using msbuild. Then they saw this behavior on one of their build machines when something wasn't installed correctly and the process just terminated, after 71 retries...
Source: I was on the visual studio environment team a decade ago, and Rube Goldberg himself could not design a build process that would surprise me, at this point.
That makes sense... I was imagining that there was some build process that froze VS 99% of the time and some poor developer was sitting at his desk silently crying into his coffee trying over and over to get his project to build so that he can go home for the weekend.
Source: I was on the visual studio environment team a decade ago, and Rube Goldberg himself could not design a build process that would surprise me, at this point.