2017.4: Legacy Vertex Lit path not working as expected

So I'm exploring options for improving performance for a mobile port of my game and my art style can actually work quite well in vertex-lit mode.

I updated my graphics settings to use the legacy vertex lit rendering path in all 3 tiers, and even tried setting it directly on my camera itself. It works (in that the scene is clearly rendered vertex-lit), but my understanding from looking at the docs (https://docs.unity3d.com/2017.4/Documentation/Manual/RenderingPaths.html) would be that all objects would be rendered in a single pass, regardless of # of lights.

My scene has 4 point lights, and if I disable or enable them it dramatically affects my batch count in statistics. Why is this? Shouldn't it have no affect?

 

No, I have shadows disabled on all of them (although even if I enable realtime shadows on any of them, no shadows appear and my batch count is unchanged, because the vertex lit rendering path cannot render shadows).