Of course the infinite loop should run as expected.
It breaks the most fundamental debugging expectations (such as "delete code until problem disappears") if the fundamental, minimal building blocks of a language, when on their own, do random rubbish.
To understand a program that does something, better first understand a program that does nothing.
As a fan of sensible analogies:
You put a salad bowl with vinegar into the fridge and notice that when you do that, the fridge stinks afterwards. You try again without the vinegar, then without the salad. In C++ world, upon receiving the empty bowl, the fridge detonates ("it is not useful"), blowing up your house. That is not OK.
But if you program a for loop computing the sum from 1 to n, this also gets replaced by a constant (unless you build in debug mode). Why would an empty loop be different?