Select's aren't an issue, so removing the other two queries wouldn't help you test the problem. The query could be simplified to use a single "INSERT" or "UPDATE" statement, but that wouldn't guarantee someone didn't change the code to break ALL query statements and not just those from store_result (https://github.com/SiebelsTim/hhvm/commit/20af8ce017c21c42ca4e8872ea885fb63a69d621).

I figured that having it use a select and transaction enclosure would be a proper way to test that the SELECT comes out /w a result like it is supposed to, while the other two come out as bool(false) like they are supposed to.