Does anyone see a downside to this addition?

An analogous patch might be desirable for `dired-create-empty-file';
however, after invoking the latter from within Dired, you just have to
hit RET to visit the new empty file (possible multiple times if parent
directories were also added), since point moves to the new entry.  So
the use case for Dired seems not as compelling as for `make-empty-file'.
What do others think?  (On the other hand, you can also invoke
`dired-create-empty-file' from outside of Dired and in that case the
prefix argument would be helpful; but that's just like
`make-empty-file', so it seems to be an unintended (mis-)feature of
`dired-create-empty-file', and indeed there's a proposal to opt out of
this behavior, see bug#77668.)

Steve Berman