We currently hide the messages badge when the user has never had any message-type notifications. That made some sense in a world where all message-type notifications came from Flow, but in today's world it doesn't make much sense any more. edit-user-talk is now in the messages bucket, and we're about to move more things in there. Cross-wiki notifications exist, and so we get bugs like T124372: If user only has foreign messages, the messages badge should not be suppressed. It seems silly to keep jumping through hoops to make this "feature" work. Eliminating this would also help a bit with T127687: Echo makes too many round-trips to memcached.