My expectation was that clone-frame, when frame-resize-pixelwise t, would implicitly DTRT. I expect most people would have the same expectation. Same as frameset-restore (now fixed with the patch).
When packages we use invoke clone-frame, we can't control their parameterization of those invocations without advice, so implied pixelwise seems wise. I added the explicit parameter more as awareness than anything else, but I imagine that carefully-crafted pixelwise child frames in packages may want explicit pixelwise clones if the authors aren't going to let-bind frame-resize-pixelwise around clone-frame calls. I'd prefer that we recommend that, actually.
Let's just do away with the pixelwise parameter and rely on the user setting? That would be in keeping with the rest of the implementation, I think.