Maybe I'm crazy, but I've seen so many older forks with that same bend (as shown in the first photo) that I've assumed it was intentional. I've personally had 2 or 3 but I'm thinking I've seen bike photos of many more that seemed to show that same backward bend. Curious.

[Addition: some perspective: Some years back I built up an older bianchi for my kids who promptly had a head-on with post on a multi-use trial. It severly bent and buckled the downtube and top tube but did nothing to the fork. I have sssumed that forks would not bend so easily --and therefore any such bend would be intentional and not the result of a head-on incident]