This behavior was already changed on the 4.0 and later branches with https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/commit/24e411d5cd7f64c5b4da25a351529cd1873284b8#diff-35082d6dcfe629e5c519b3883801b8cd2d7d2fa57db997ad1566e0e35c93dc99 from SERVER-29908. We'd like to do the same on the 3.6 branch to avoid having the {shardingState: 1} command response exceed the maximum BSONObj size (16MB) when sharding isn't even enabled.