It may not, if it isn’t needed by any package in the current transaction list. My recalled observed instances of not needed include:
system already up-to-date
transaction includes only packages representing updates (none representing upgrades)
Seeing the message is actually rather routine here, because I commonly run a pre-dup script first that upgrades only a limited group of things, such as libzypp, rpm, systemd, udev and their deps.
My first and only upgrade to 20250308 was just shy of 1,000 packages, on an installation starting from 20250307 having neither Gnome nor Plasma nor XFCE.
You will be surprised, but not everything you do not know is false.
zypper shows this message when a product is going to be updated. Technically it means the package openSUSE-release. In practice every Tumbleweed snapshot bumps the version of this package. But if you run zypper up ... for selected packages only, zypper will not emit this message.
Which, BTW, happens when you have packages from Packman or some devel repos that may (and usually do) update their content without waiting for an official (and tested) snapshot being released.
Such occurrences often cause mismatches and trouble so use that at your own risk (just search for Mesa in the Forums…).