Across a few SE sites I've had several bounties expire on questions without any answers having been posted.
I've just noticed on this and on this question that the grace periods on the bounties expire within several hours.
In these particular cases, is there any remaining utility for the bounties during their grace period? For example, is there any mechanism that would allow at least partial granting, or are they now simply moot?
If there was an answer with two votes, it could potentially collect 50% via the bounty auto-award mechanism. In fact, that might still work for answers posted during the grace period (i.e. right now!), although I'm not really sure of that, ergo this question.