Yeah I'm not sure what happened in the other ticket. We shouldn't be changing the owner/group. That functionality used to be needed for the ruby puppet master, as it dropped privileges to the puppet:puppet user group.
Sounds good
merged into 5.5.x with https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/commit/f884c251f98deb28da7c61b83e7bf80e16d2e046
This has passed ci as a part of puppet-agent 5.5.20.67.gd81ca8e8