The Chrome team pushes out buggy stuff into stable all the time. Heck, they pushed out that HTTPS header thing into stable a while back, broke a heck of a lot of sites using a proxy for HTTPS implementation. Took them 2 weeks to get that fixed, and they actually knew about the problem when the code was still in canary. The fix simply didn’t get applied to the correct branches, and voila, it made it to stable before anybody noticed.
Screwing up the layout and then having it magically fix itself by forcing a redraw is clearly a bug. You can fix it any number of ways. Scrolling the page fixes it on most pages. Calling jQuery('#adminmenuwrap').hide().show(0);
to force it to hide and show instantly fixes it as well. It’s just forcing a redraw.
The only thing that adding a transform: translateZ(0);
does is to trigger a re-render of the specified element in the 3d engine. It’s not magic. It’s certainly not evil scheme Chrome has to make people use transform statements. It’s just causing the re-render and thus tricking the browser to follow a path that lacks the associated bug.