This is not entirely absurd. In the case of major budget or appropriations bills, amendments are made right up to the moment of passage. Despite modern computer technology, it turns out that the copies submitted to the President for his signature do not have all these amendments in neat print but many times amendments (usually money amounts) handwritten in the margins and spaces of the copies attested by the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate and sent to the White House. Once signed, these copies are then re-examined for the typesetting of the final version which is to be published in Statutes at Large.
Nowadays (since 1975) the practice is to print up the Statutes at Large advance sheet immediately. With such appropriations bills, the advance sheet is simply a photocopy of the marked up final version, to which a new caption as a statute has been attached. The typesetting of the final Statutes at Large version may take months, and there are at least a few instance of such bills being published far behind the normal schedule.
Some other bills similarly have a flurry of amendments and only the final passage puts a stop to the amendments and enables anyone to read what can be confidently described as the definitive text of the bill.