No I do not think that is. Should all boats book out? Should we book out when we get in the car to drive around the corner? Where does it all stop?
Light aircraft are subject to a very significant amount of regulatory oversight. Many of the people who work within 'the system' have no sense of proportionality and simply invent further 'rules' to serve their self importance. We can all think of exceptional circumstances where sometime made things better or indeed much worst.
Is there a legal requirement now? It seems not. Was there a legal requirement? Well dependent upon interpretation probably yes.
This forum and the others are full of these sort of threads where the regulations are subject to much argument, simply because they are not written in a simple and straight forward way. How can that possibly be acceptable?