That's right - it does seem to have to do with trying to be helpful.

One demo of this that reliably works for me:

Write a draft of something and ask the LLM to find the errors.

Correct the errors, repeat.

It will never stop finding a list of errors!

The first time around and maybe the second it will be helpful, but after you've fixed the obvious things, it will start complaining about things that are perfectly fine, just to satisfy your request of finding errors.