What we were trying to do was help the parents to teach the kids to self-soothe. So in effect, we weren't saying that they wouldn't wake. We were saying that they would wake, but they wouldn't have to signal their parents. They could go back down into the next sleep cycle.
The conversations around sleep training are always rife with folks focusing on their own perceived risks, and the emotional guilt, that come with making trade-off decisions. While we over-focus on the noisy crying, we miss focusing on the skill building part of sleep training: training kids and parents the skill of soothing themselves in the absence of the other. Skill building with kids can sometimes be super hard on both kids and parents; welcome to Parenting.