It has usefulness, and it's more than a duplicate.  It includes a patch for fixing errors with the default static build options, to make it easier for people wanting a fresh cabal and ghc install that is capable of building packages instead of failing to build pretty much anything once installed, without configuration to fix them other than dropped command-line flags that were being ignored (this part at least has already been fixed).  I shared it hoping it would benefit more than just me.

There already is an issue (#8624) and work for it, and hopefully they can be finished in not too long, and then upstream will have the patches too.