It surprises me that the compiler doesn't still take the inference from the assert and just disable emitting the code to perform the check. Over the last 15 years I've worked on many codebases that are written with unnecessary asserts, partly as documentation, but maybe because people assumed it helped the compiler.
I've also worked on many codebases (and written code like this on my own projects) where the code looks like: assert(condition); if (condition) { ... } because I still want that safety check in release builds, and want the exception in debug builds but absolutely not ever in release builds.