Do You Use It? macOS Versioning Sees Low Awareness and Adoption

Does auto-save not save if there have been no changes? It would make sense not to save an unchanged version, but sometimes programs do not behave in ways that make sense to me.

In another thread, I asked about combining PDFs in Preview.

The whole operation took only a couple of minutes and I did not have any intermediate Save operations. I assume versioning is not responsible for the growth in file size. Can someone confirm this? (I’m not asking what else might be responsible; there was some discussion about that in the other thread.)