When explaining a pipeline containing a $unionWith stage, we first exhaust the pipeline to gather the execution stats. For union, this may or may not involve building and targetting its sub-pipeline depending on the subsequent stages (e.g. $limit may allow us to stream results directly from the base collection without using the pipeline). Next, we will serialize the $unionWith stage, at which point we "re-run" the pipeline and gather the explain output for it.

There are separate issues with this depending on whether we're running in a sharded cluster:

1. If not sharded: the executionStats reported for the inner pipeline will not take into account subsequent stages such as $limit which could affect the nReturned stat.
2. If sharded: The initial pass to exhaust the pipeline does not actually pull from the sub-pipeline since the helper we delegate to will see the explain bit and run a scatter-gather to get the results from each shard instead of establishing cursors to iterate. This means that the union stage essentially gets a no-op pipeline back, and the executionStats reported by the union stage itself will not include any potential documents from the sub-pipeline.