Here's another minimal step suggested by D93229 / D93397 .
(I'm trying to be extra careful in these changes because load transforms are easy to get wrong.)
We can optimistically choose the greater alignment of a load and its pointer operand. As the test diffs show, this can improve what would have been unaligned vector loads into aligned loads.
When we enhance with gep offsets, we will need to adjust the alignment calculation to include that offset.