Ned, I have prepared PR14605 for the 3.7 branch to revert 85ed1712e428f93408f56fc684816f9a85b0ebc0. As this is somehow changing behavior in the 3.7 series, I think is the best course of action for 3.7.

For 3.8 the proposed way to do this is now using an unconditional jump to skip the conditional (in progress in PR 14116). The reason is that we need to compile the blocks to detect syntax errors even if the block will be unreachable. This is also a deep implementation detail and it should not be rely upon, in my opinion.