Github user ham1 commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/jmeter/pull/348
Yes it is picked up by the GUI there, but there isn't any way to configure
it in the GUI (as confirmed by the docs) so I can't see how it's useful. The
default constructor is blank thus I think it just wouldn't perform any
filtering. I've tested loading a test plan with the old filter in there and
when you run it just throws an exception, so it would just need editing by the
user to fix.---
