This is expected behavior, not a bug. The guard you are hitting is intentional — it protects against a class of mistakes that used to cause data loss.

If you need the other behavior, there is a documented filter you can hook to override it per site.

I respectfully disagree on one detail. In my setup the opposite held true, though I suspect it comes down to community size.

One caveat for larger communities: keep an eye on the indexes. At a few thousand rows the difference is night and day.