Even if you assume worse case that the base of the bjt is at ac ground, that would still leave you with a 1k in parallel with a 100k, so yea it should still be approx 1k. if this was an analog signal id say yes there is a reason, noise. but for digital not really, except the extra current from the led circuit. only other reasons i can think of not to do this for reg operation would be costs and space savings.
-Pb