Slot mods after the November 2019 patch

Thanks for responding @SimGuruTwoLegs. It's a bit of a surprise to discover this rig bone limit five years into the game. It's even more surprising to hear that slotted items were causing the game to crash before this patch as no one reported anything like that to us. We typically hear pretty quickly if something is going wrong, even if it's occurring at a low level. Had we known about this rig bone safety limit, we would not have been blithely helping people to exceed that limit for the last four or so years.

That said, if all deco bones are removed from a slotted item, the slots still work. Is there a downside to retaining deco slots that lack a corresponding bone?