I just came across this change in R-devel and it seems R4.6 will ship with a bit more verbosity control (https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/NEWS.html):
“… New logical option() quiet, defaulting to false, set to TRUE by R’s command-line option --quiet (and similar), now can be switched during an R session. Prompted by Dirk Eddelbuettel’s proposal in PR#18913.”
This might simplify a few things in the future.