HA_NO_BLOBS for HA_CONNECT needed?

Is there a particular reason why the CONNECT storage engine defines the HA_NO_BLOBS parameter?

In my particular use case, I just need to federate "some" data (possibly terabytes) from another location, and that location contains some JSON blobs. This is in a read-only context.

Removing the HA_NO_BLOBS flag allows me to define columns as TEXT to pull in the JSON data from the remote MySQL/MariaDB servers. This appears to be working just fine.

My particular use case is a read-only use case and only using the federated side of CONNECT. Is it possible this flag is set due to write workloads, or other data sources like CSV files that the engine supports? If so, I think this should be gated some other way so at least federated reading would be possible.

Otherwise, we normally would get the following error message:
ERROR 42000: Storage engine CONNECT doesn't support BLOB/TEXT columns