The problem here was that there are five path types internally (diffuse, glossy, transmission, subsurface and volume scatter), but subsurface isn't exposed to the user.
This caused some weird behaviour - if all four types are disabled on the lamp, Cycles doesn't even try sampling it, but if any type was active, the lamp would illuminate
the cube since none of the options set subsurface to zero.
In the future, it might be reasonable to add subsurface visibility as an option - but for now the weird and inconsistent behaviour can be fixed simply by setting both
diffuse and subsurface to zero if the user disables diffuse visibility.
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