Thanks for testing, that's good news. It must have been something random that fixed it, though unfortunately that means another random change can break it again. But hopefully not.
I agree it's not really a regression, and arguably not even a bug. So don't feel obligated to work on this.
The code changes for 2 and 3 could be done already with an #if version check. Generally we try to keep Blender building with somewhat older and newer versions of library dependencies to make…
Overall this looks like a nice improvement, but there are some test failures to be looked at.
Can we call this single_hit
to keep it generic?
We currently have issues with the GPU tests with EEVEE timing out. However there do appear to be some Cycles Metal test failures before that happened.