I suspect that, at least for most Cubase users, the can of worms opening, or just feeling like someone is speaking to you in Martian, would be a strong likelihood. 
Then, for some of us (and I include myself in this group), it would get us at least jumping down some rabbit holes and experimenting, whether or not we ever found anything that was consistently useful. (Side note: Back toward the end of my period of using SONAR, while I was just starting up with Cubase 9.5, or maybe 10 by that point, I was working directly with Cakewalk’s CTO, who was having me try various performance configuration possibilities with the significant tuning possibilities offered in SONAR. Though I religiously tried all the things he requested and reported results back, ultimately, nothing addressed my issue, and I actually found I got at least a little more mileage out of Cubase on the performance front, specifically with my relatively heavy virtual instrument use – all my tracks other than vocals tend to be virtual instruments. That may actually have been due to ASIO Guard, or perhaps the combination of that with the Steinberg Power Plan though I’d also been using a high-performance power plan with SONAR.)
For the case of the “HALion trick” – i.e. adding a new instrument track with HALion (or really any relatively lightweight virtual instrument that doesn’t just hog a bunch of CPU when doing nothing) and giving it the focus so Cubase has to be ready to let the user play through it in real time – though, that was pretty consistent in making a difference, at least in my case (starting with Cubase 14, which is when I first heard about it on a Facebook group and found it worked, at least until you got up to a point where nothing would help enough, such as if Ozone’s music rebalance module was active in my case). And the Windows Task Manager clearly showed a difference in the CPU balance:
Thus, my question in later threads on the general subject (and also included in the “additional comments” section of my response to the annual Cubase feedback survey) was, since this is consistent, is there something Cubase could do internally to force the same result without having to add a virtual instrument thread with the focus? (While the workaround might seem pretty minor on the surface, a problem was that, if you had to do something that took the focus off that track, such as if you’re want to work on another track in the context of the mix where the focus needs to be on that track, not only would the audio engine dropout recur, but it also could sometimes make for big audio spikes at the transition of focus.)