It wasn't really that much. Looks worse in the picture because of the angle the picture was taken from. Besides, back in the day before store bought 45's, 22.5's and so on how did they do it? On top of that they can x-ray, cut out a strip and bend, twist, pull and do whatever they want to. Got a good root in, good hot pass, fill and cap. The pipe will go before the weld. Out in a ditch miles from anywhere and you get the job done, cut a 45 down to a 22.5, 22.5 to an 11-1/4 or if you don't have a store bought fitting get out the black book and go old school and make it happen. Contractor got me weld-o-lets one time that were 8-12's for 4" pipe, the saddle had a gap about 3/4" inch of open root. Told them that won't work, they did not have 4-8 weld-o-lets. So, made my own saddle and branch, welded them out.
Although I suppose we I could have told them to special order an 11-1/4 degree fitting, waited several days and shut the job down. When it arrived I would have had to cut it down and widdle it down to a 5-5/8 degree fitting or less. Besides if you do a 45 and you mitre 22.5 degrees on each pipe, then bevel and weld it I fail to see what would cause the pipe to be weaker than a 45* fitting? If your using x42 pipe it's still x42 pipe with a mitre, you still do an open root, hot and fill and cap, it won't change the structure of the metal anymore than doing a straight but weld. Make sure you tie in the sides on your hot pass, same with the fill pass and then a cap that is no more than 1/8" at the crown and no undercut on the toes or pinholes. Looking through 1104 I did not see anything, but still learning where to find stuff so I could be wrong.