The --no-check-dest is removing the LISTs for you.
However you'll still be charged for the PUTs won't you? According to Amazon S3 Pricing - Cloud Object Storage - AWS PUT requests cost $0.005 per 1000 whereas HEAD requests cost $0.0004 so avoiding the HEAD request saves $0.0004 out of $0.005 + $0.0004 which is about 7%. So not nothing but not a massive saving.
I had a go at adding the new flag here. I think the minimum set of flags for uploading with one transactions per file becomes --s3-no-head --no-check-dest --s3-no-check-bucket
v1.54.0-beta.5112.a20c1df9d.fix-s3-no-head on branch fix-s3-no-head (uploaded in 15-30 mins)
Here is the help for it
If set, don't HEAD uploaded objects to check integrity
This can be useful when trying to minimise the number of transactions
rclone does.
Setting it means that if rclone receives a 200 OK message after
uploading an object with PUT then it will assume that it got uploaded
properly.
In particular it will assume:
- the metadata, including modtime, storage class and content type was as uploaded
- the size was as uploaded
It read these items from the response for a single part PUT - for
multipart uploads these aren't read:
- the MD5SUM
- The uploaded date
If an object of unknown length is uploaded then rclone will do a
HEAD request.
Setting this flag increases the chance for undetected upload failures,
in particular an incorrect size, so it isn't recommended for normal
operation. In practice the chance of an undetected upload failure is
very small even with this flag.