trivial change to .ab intentional?

Hello,

Sometime in the past three weeks, the behavior of groff's .ab request
changed slightly, so that it now emits a newline to stderr even when
there is no abort message.  Is this change intentional?

$ echo '.ab' | groff > /dev/null
$ echo '.ab' | groff-latest > /dev/null

$ groff-latest --version | head -1
GNU groff version 1.23.0.4731-3b532-modified

The behavior is the same whether ab is called with the normal (.) or
no-break (') control character--which would be expected, since the
choice of control character should affect only stdout, not stderr.

I suspect that this is not intentional, because the only recent
commits that mention aborting are labeled refactors.