Pop Culture

In short, emails still use an old ASCII protocol from the 80s, and old servers used unix tools that read pipes line-by-line.
To avoid emails with long lines slowing down the servers, they break long lines before sending them.
Because it's ASCII, they use an ASCII control sequence to mark inserted line breaks.
That sequence is =␍␊.
There's some sequence of screwups in the email export that ended up with last word =␍␊first word getting replaced with last word =irst word instead of last word first word.