I have attached the latest 12.1 Oracle JDBC driver documentation, which suggests that this solution is no longer necessary. However, this is only true when executing against a 12c DB instance.

If we are executing against an 11gR2 or previous DB instance version, even if using the 12.1 driver, executeBatch() returns -2 (Statement.SUCCESS_NO_INFO) and thus batch updates with versioned data will not work correctly with stock Hibernate (meaning that optimistic locking will silently fail causing lost updates), requiring the solution proposed in this issue.