This not only matches its use in CON but seems to be used as a counter in most other places as well.
The main reason is to improve readability of CON to ZScript conversions.
As it turned out this is simply too dangerous - these should be left to be loaded from the map data or set manually.
All remaining setups using this feature have either been moved to Initialize or other meta properties that are not affected by map loading.
This was a typical case of doing too many things in one function - the bogus code was for one of RR's special projectiles piggybacking on the same function and doing it wrong.