To be clear, I am okay with fixing this individual issue on 4-0-stable, because it clearly disagrees with the docs – if there is a safe way to do it without accidentally introducing other bugs.

I'm not sure if this (cherry picking the diffs out of that other PR directly) qualifies, because of the aforementioned history and complexity. It could be, I'm just unsure at this point, and I suggest that we need to proceed with caution.