after reading the docs some, it appears the point of the notification is to allow a service to run as a "foreground" service rather than "background"
so I suspect this is related to aggressive OEM service killing and may not be necessary on AOSP? background services are only supposed to be killed when the system is low on resources, and, importantly, auto-restarted once the condition is over
@unascribed I'm pretty sure it doesn't, I had the persistent notification for the Pebble app off the entire time