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Yesterday I heard someone say, "I'm an old hat at this" instead of "an old hand", making me wonder if there was a special term for such a usage. Not a mixed metaphor (there's no metaphors, nothing is being liken to something else), or a malapropism (confusing two similar sounding words but the speaker wasn't confusing "hat" and "hand", but rather two whole phrases).

This was something different, and after some research I found the word I was looking for, a malaphor. This seems to have been coined by Lawrence Harrison in 1976, according to Douglas Hofstadter, whose insightful discussion is available here.

Searching on malaphor throws up many examples. Some, such as "It's not rocket surgery" I suspect of being intentional humour, but others have a surreal logic and are probably bona fide. See here for Susie Dent's Top 10, including the magical and inspired "Like lemmings to the slaughter".

The things we say reveal ways in which our minds work and it's interesting that in all the example above the intended meaning is perfectly clear. The speaker groped for a stock phrase that would make what they said more vivid, found two candidates that shared some features (structure, vocabulary, semantic field etc.) and confused them, but it didn't matter, because the substantive information had been conveyed elsewhere, and the general drift ("going back a while", "very hard and technical", "unwitting victims") came across anyway.