What is the community's opinion on modifying older-style duplicate closures to the newer style?

Question

This is not a duplicate of Editing duplicate banner edited into the text of the question. The main question there is only if something "special" will happen if someone edits out the automatic text. The answer addresses this question, but it's from an SE employee; I'm asking specifically for the community's opinion on this, which may be different from SE's position.

Should users with gold-badge dupehammer privileges modify older-style duplicate closures where the duplicate targets were edited into the question body by the Community user, into the newer form of closure where the list is an automatic box added above the post? There exists an official response here, but I noticed a user going around and doing this, so I was wondering if the community's opinion was different from SE's.

Here's an example revision history where such a thing was done.

In my opinion, there's no advantage to doing this because:

• There isn't much visual change made to the post, other than some formatting differences and that the heading now says "This question already has an answer here" instead of "Possible Duplicate".

• Those posts are unnecessarily bumped when this action is taken, from both the reopening and the subsequent edit to remove the target list from the post body.

• The original close voters and original closure date is no longer shown in the question's notice; it instead just shows the one user who performed the modification, and makes it seem like a recent unilateral decision rather than a consensus a long time ago.

I can see one potential benefit: normal users can no longer modify the target list, which now requires a user with gold-badge privileges. But there isn't much evidence of this happening on a wider scale, and as the posts are bumped anyway when that happens, that can easily be rolled back as needed.

Should users go around and change all these old-form closures into the new form? What if a user comes across one of those posts, but it's not active in a while? if it's recently active?

What's the community's position on this?

Answer 1

For me the benefit of the new banner is that it automatically updates the question title if the title has been edited after closure of the duplicate question.

The new banner also allows editing the list of duplicates, which is also very useful at time.

For most cases though, updating the banner is just cosmetically. However, if I stumble across an old duplicate question, I will edit it just for the sake of consistency.

Editing just one when you come across it won't hurt the community. Editing en-masse without a script written and executed by SE should not be done. Letting SE do the cleanup makes much more sense, but they don't seem to want to put the time and effort in. So I guess it is not important enough.