As demonstrated, it does. The more important questions is “What does replying as a new topic do to notifications and topic tracking?” And for now the answer seems to be “It breaks them horribly.”
On the positive side, the “Which topic do you want to reply to?” confirmation when posting to a split topic is a nice way to nudge posts to the topic they best fit into. I don’t remember that last time I brought up these issues, so nice work if that’s new.
