> Perhaps it should instead use two specific flags, TYPEFLAG_HASBITFIELD and TYPEFLAG_HASUNION
This seems better at first sight. It's not making any suitability decisions (apart from doing the unrolling), and the meaning of these flags will be less volatile than TYPEFLAG_NONARGTYPE because that assessment depends on current limitations, and those limitations might change over time.
I'm going into a period of two weeks where I may not have much time to work on this due to other time commitments, so if you want to press on with it, go right ahead :-)