It's new... ish. I think it was implemented with the changes in the May. 10, 2019 (JST) Version Update.
I don't think it should produce different results however, but it is different in that if you trigger it from the config utility, the game client acts as if there was an update available, and performs the steps similar to that when launching the game. I would not be surprised though, if it checked entirely different things than what the check via the PlayOnline Viewers start screen checks... but it would be at least a bit weird.
That said, testing them out now after a long while, I do notice that the start screen check mentions going through 59464 files while the "version update check" went through a little over 47000 files, so there's that.
It is interesting that there was such an issue here, since the changes to the areas seemed to be a server-side only, meaning there was no game client change required, and only the areas in question were unavailable for a short while. Perhaps there was something else going on as well that managed to upset the local files.
(As a sidey-note, I also play on Linux, via Wine, but I don't use anything that would alter the game behaviour or otherwise interact with its data. I was online in game during the time the change was reverted, checked the areas in question after they were done, and indeed the issue was gone with that for me.)