Hello, I’m going to do a little testing as that information sounds incorrect to me (or the docs need updating)
A member is created regardless of approval and set to a status depending on your approval flow.
Members who require manual approval are created and assigned a pending status as per the docs
“A created member waiting for approval has a status of PENDING”
As far as the hook firing, I would agree that this sounds like either a bug or incorrectly described.
And re: turning comments off - I only do that when folks bump up really old posts with comments that should be new questions to keep the forum threads less confusing, you are fine continuing to talk about the original issue as you work throuhg it.