Hmm. I see it like this:

Before there where just assertions that never ran at all. Now there are assertions that actually run, and do actual tests of the code, and it works, right?

So as long as there are not further problems detected with this and the other test in question above, I'd really wish these things can be used as proposed - if that should really prove to be not good enough or lead to actual real world problems, I can optimize it.