This gets more complicated when an inlined function calls another inlined function. The whole inner function may be in the middle of dead code, and thus everything it calls, too, and so all be elided. This sort of thing happens all the time. These elisions don't typically make code obviously much faster, cycle-wise, but they do make it smaller, with a smaller cache footprint. Cache footprint has a huge effect on overall performance.
In principle, the compiler could arrange to put the dead code in some other page, with a conditional jump there that never happens, consuming just another branch prediction slot. But branch prediction slots are cache, and the branch, though never taken, nonetheless consumes a slot. A processor ISA could, in principle, have a conditional branch instruction that is assumed by branch prediction always to go one way, and so not need to consume any branch prediction cache. But I don't know of any. RISC-V does not seem to be entertaining plans to specify such a branch.
Several extant chips do allow "hint" prefixes for branches, but I think they are ignored in current chips, according to experience where they were determined generally to be wrong. This is unfortunate, as sometimes the most frequently taken direction is not the one you want to be fastest. E.g., when spinning while watching an atomic flag, you want the looping branch to be assumed not taken, to minimize latency once the flag is clear, even though it most frequently is taken in recent history. (High-frequency trading code often has to resort to trickery to get the desired behavior.)
(There is a famous story about engineers at Digital Equipment Corporation, whence we got PDP-11s and Vaxen, and thus, indirectly, Unix. A comprehensive cycle count showed that a huge proportion of the instructions executed in their OS kernel were just one instruction. They moved heaven and earth to optimize this one instruction, but the kernel with the new instruction was exactly 0% faster. It turned out the instruction was used only in the idle loop that ran while waiting until something useful could be done. This really happened, and the same mistake is made again and again, to this day: e.g., people will sincerely swear that "rotl" and "popcnt" instructions are not important, on about the same basis.)
Intel recently implemented an atomic test-and-loop instruction that just stalls execution until an identified cache line is touched, thus avoiding the branch prediction stall getting out of the loop. I have not heard of anybody using it.
