It was a very specific workflow to retain the timestamp of a snapshot for cases where you want to effectively “import” an original snapshot into another document. I do not understand the relevance to your query—but I would say it is “best practices” in terms of being the best way to do precisely what I just described. 
As for the first thread, it seemed they were referring to an old display glitch, but as you can see from how the thread ended, they never got back, so we will probably never know if what they saw was a user error, a new bug, or what.
Are you saying that if you try my test project you don’t get four snapshots?