Clipping to the infinite rect causes the cairo engine to perform incorrect clipping. I tracked the code down into the cairo code and at some point, the very large negative number representing the rect's X was somehow transformed to 256, which is obviously not right. In my situation, clipping to the infinite rect actually caused nothing else to be painted (everything was clipped).
If it helps, this was the reason the first patch from https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118665 (https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=217047) was rolled out.