Osmosis applying changeset to apiDB sets visible field to false

I am following the blog post here to maintain an up to date region of OSM data. I had trouble filtering my API db in Postgres by a bounding polygon after applying changesets. I eventually discovered that this was because the visible field of all entities I imported with:

osmosis --rri --simc --wdc host=localhost database=test user=xx password=yy validateSchemaVersion=no

was set to false. If I manually set the visible field to true I can filter out the new points successfully, otherwise the new points are not filtered out with a bounding polygon query.

Is there a reason that osmosis sets visible to false or that visible=f nodes are not included in polygon queries? I had a look through the source code and did some searches but couldn't see anything obvious there.