Maybe there was something else there before, and it stopped working when they removed it, so they tried adding back the most minimal thing they could think of as a sanity check.
"Why doesn't this work?". Add debug statement. "Huh, now this works". Take out debug statement. "Huh, now it doesn't work". Try no-op. Table flip. Commit.
I love Heisenbugs because I have seen one in the wild. It's the most absurd thing ever.
Maybe they even knew that white space would work. However some people (including me) wouldn't even look twice before they remove white space. An explicit no-op on the other hand would get my attention.