Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:
I don't recall whether there is any active plan to move away from the
merge default, though.
I don't, either, but if we were to do so, keeping the warning/advice
being discussed is crucial to avoid breakage.
Hopefully by now most existing users who would have depended on
unconfigured default behaviour of merging have explicitly shown
their preference by setting the configuration to squelch the
message, so it might not be such a huge backward compatibility
nightmare. I dunno.