Absolutely - there are cases when branch misprediction is not the bottleneck. It depends on a lot of factors.
Another such case is when sorting strings because every comparison causes a potential cache miss and introduces even more branching, and all that would dwarf that one misprediction.
Another such case is when sorting strings because every comparison causes a potential cache miss and introduces even more branching, and all that would dwarf that one misprediction.