I can confirm that it is still happening in LV2019, I was coming on here to see if there was a workaround, and yours would probably do the trick.
In my case, I don't want to "pad" anything in the empty cells of the rows...so just using arrays is not very friendly. I was setting the cell value of the row/index was working great, until I updated an unrelated typedef and now my property node barfs an error anytime *any* enum value is changed in the UI.
Yuk.
