Yeah, take a look at a Meanwell .pdf. There's a page called "Dimming Operation". With no resistance across the dimmer wires (referred to as "OPEN" in the .pdf) the driver should run at 102% to 108% of its rated capacity. With 100K ohms across the dimmer wires (in other words, you've plugged in your 100K ohm potentiometer and turned it all the way up) the driver is supposed to run at 100% of capacity. If the driver sees 90K ohms it's supposed to drop to 90% output. And so on, down to 10K ohms and 10% of rated capacity.
My understanding is Meanwell doesn't want their drivers run below 10%, so that's why some folks recommend adding a 10K ohm resistor in series with the pot. With the resistor in place you can twist the potentiometer to zero and the driver will still see the resistor's 10K ohms. So it won't go below 10% output.
Of course, adding the 10K ohm resistor in line with the pot means that when you've got the pot twisted all the way to 100K ohms the driver sees 110K ohms. We don't really care about that. The driver should run just a little bit harder at 110K ohms than 100K ohms. Maybe not enough to see the difference with the naked eye. I'm guessing an electronic meter that reads lux or PAR would pick up the difference between 100K ohms and 110K ohms.
So, long story short, yes, the driver should run harder with no dimming device at all connected to the dimmer wires. Meanwell engineered their drivers to accept 3 different methods for dimming, but the potentiometer is the simplest so that's what most growers choose.
Did watering alleviate that sad, droopy look?