Would bet that this is exactly why. I run Tesla GPUs in my server rack which don't even have display ports, but they run any OS just fine with the vGPU drivers, which Nvidia make an absolute pain to obtain.
The _very_ first gen of Tesla cards did have those headers on them, IIRC, and then successive ones had the headers on the board but not connected for another generation or so, IIRC.
You also used to be able to edit the PCI IDs for the drivers to get the Tesla ones to attach to consumer GPUs, but that stopped working at some point.
