Currently, there are instances where a CollectionRoutingInfo is acquired just so the caller can check whether a collection is sharded not. However, since this uses a cached routing table, the information from this acquisition could be stale and inform incorrect decisions along the distributed query planning path. Moreover, as SPM-4078 will port over existing direct CatalogCache accesses for the routing tables to the RoutingContext, these acquisitions would violate the principle that every routing table that is acquired needs to be validated by having sent a versioned request to a shard.

These isSharded() checks need to be replaced with a cheap way to send requests to the shards for validation.