[tomn]

This could end up being worse from a signal-integrity point-of-view, as now both of those traces have a stub (of different lengths!), which will comb-filter the signal.

If you wanted to be fancy, it would have been better to lift those two pins, or to cut the traces.

All this is completely unnecessary given the speeds involved (12Mbit/s) and possible skew or stub lengths, which they acknowledge.