Yes, it is. The Smart Lock needs to run for months on a couple of AA or lithium batteries. Without extended battery saving mechanisms the batteries would be empty within a week. There has also been no change to this in recent betas.
What has changed with firmwares >5.8.3 is that the Smart Lock connects to a new backend infrastructure. So if you heavily restrict the outgoing internet access for the Smart Lock, it might not be able to connect to the backend anymore, which also disables remote access.