Dumbo playground not required and no pagers given

I am at Magic Kingdom today, and I brought my daughter to Dumbo. I noticed that even though they are on a 35 minute wait, they are letting people skip the playground and not giving out pagers to people that are going into the play area. I've seen this happen plenty of times before when there is no wait, but I've never seen it when there is.

The play area is supposed to be part of the queue wait time. Not making people go in penalizes the people that do.

Is this an intentional change? If so, I don't think it's a great idea. It defeats the purpose of a virtual queue "play while you wait" system.

EDIT: To answer a few of the responses to this thread...

I have had annual passes on and off since about 2013. We would usually get the passes for a couple of years and then take a year off to keep the experience "fresh." We had last purchased passes around Christmas of 2019. At that time, I remember the pagers still being used unless the queue was very short. Our passes were "paused" for the pandemic in 2020. When they were reactivated, the Dumbo play area was completely shut for a time and then was optional for the remainder of those passes. I chalked that up to COVID precautions. We took one of our one-year breaks from annual passes after those expired, but when we went to purchase them again, we couldn't because Disney had stopped selling passes that included weekends for a time. We were finally able to get new passes when they returned in April of 2023. Since then, we have only done Dumbo when the line has been very short. Today was the first day we went to Dumbo with a wait over 30 minutes, and that's when I noticed that there were still no pagers or "play while you wait" virtual queue.

Some people are saying you were never forced to wait in the play area, but that isn't completely accurate. There are plenty of old posts on some of the Disney forums about being forced to wait. Sometimes they would let you skip the play area, but I found that was usually when the queue was very short. After a very quick Google search, here is an example of an old thread where people discussed being forced to wait... https://www.disboards.com/threads/dont-be-fooled-by-what-looks-like-a-small-standby-line-for-dumbo.3228800/

The line at Dumbo still has signage that mentions the pagers and "play while you wait" system. In addition, the official Disney website still mentions "play while you wait." https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/attractions/magic-kingdom/dumbo-the-flying-elephant/

EDIT 2: I think it's hilarious how much I've been downvoted on my post and comments. I'm assuming it's from a bunch of adult fans of Disney getting their feelings hurt that someone would be disappointed about this change to eliminate the playground virtual queue area on a ride intended for children.