A release that published nothing is not news, and at a 5-minute cadence those
messages would bury the ones that matter — the log and bin/repo timers still
show the run happened.
Removing it would have left a start report with no follow-up, so the start
report now carries its own answer: check-versions writes the package names it
queued into the state file instead of touching an empty one, and the release
run reads them. 'A build is running' becomes 'your package is in this build',
which is the question the reports exist to answer.