Consider the following oplog entry:

const createCollectionOplogEntry = {
op: "c",
ns: "test.$cmd",
o: {
create: "ts",
clusteredIndex: true,
timeseries:

{ timeField: "t", metaField: "m", granularity: "seconds", bucketMaxSpanSeconds: 3600, }

,
},
};

If we run the applyOps command on a primary with this entry, we will successfully create a collection that has time-series options but does not have a corresponding buckets collection.

Interestingly also, it does not appear that this collection appears when running the listCommand command.

Using rawData, it appears that the collection is still bucketing data and is functionally a time-series collection. So essentially it seems that this creates a viewless time-series collection, without having the feature flag for this feature enabled