They fixed the permission issue, and I was able to create an index, update documents in it, and query for them, so I’d say the change is good!
I did realize that this still won’t work if people have multiple hosts with different context paths (e.g. http://server1/first/search/host, http://server2/second/search/host). Hopefully no one would do that, but is it worth mentioning in the documentation/comments for the change? Won’t matter one way or the other to me, we’ll only need one host url.