I got curious myself and agreed, so I went looking.
A lot of sources specified that it was part of a technical requirements checklist, and…
Yeap. It doesn’t explicitly require a “press any key” screen, but it gives a more pleasant screen to look at while you select a user. People online also say it’s used to detect which controller is in use.
If you add a feature like this to a game, it becomes harder to maintain if there are discrepancies between builds. So presumably it’s usually just left in rather than removed.
I was visiting there in 2019. Of the hundreds of thousands of balconies there, I saw less than a hundred with lights on ~10pm.
It’s far away too. ~18km to get there from Iskandar Puteri (not intensely dense, but sees some traffic due to legoland), and ~35km from Johor Bahru (the main city area of Johor).
They must have done the whole build it and they will come thing before realising no one wants to live in a ghost town.
At least it looked kinda impressive???