Well, the logging system (in this case slf4j) will make the decision to write or not write a message based on the user-selected logging level. The reason we were checking in the first place is because this happens very frequently in a performance-sensitive area, and the construction of the message (via `String.format`) would happen regardless of the logging level. In other words, we'd be doing expensive string formatting work to pass a string that might never actually get logged.

Now that we're using the variadic placeholder approach, the cost is just that of passing the arguments. If the user has decided not to log trace-level messages, the logging system won't do the expensive string-formatting work until it has to.