You're right that a maximally-performant implementation would definitely omit the query entirely. Even a query like "SELECT 1;" is slower than just about anything done within PHP, since a network request introduces a (relative) ton of latency.

However, I would consider it a slightly worse patch if it fixed this because it would increase the code complexity a fair bit, and the only benefit would be saving a few milliseconds on a page that will probably only be accessed a handful of times each day. In fact, if I'd implemented this, I probably would've left the query as-is, since that would've only used a few additional miliseconds.