I'd be willing to bet the change was made to make the returned drolvarg part of the earring quest step take a little more effort to complete - not that there's really a ton of effort required to complete it even with the change.
One of the devs replied that it's a bug on another thread. This one makes it a pita to do both 6th and 1st floor keys.
We spawned that thing today and stumbled on it when we moved on from pulling floor 6 lol. That's an annoying bug