'Sorry we shot you in the foot. We can solve it by amputating the leg.'
This is a textbook example of overwhelming UI design failure. If modality is considered bad interface design, multi-modality that differs seemingly arbitrarily according to subtly different contexts purely to work around another design failure is truly execrable. It is an interface that's impossible to use correctly. Whoever came up with this idea should be banned from contributing to any UI design for life.