> Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do.
Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.
But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.
And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.