I wonder if there is a way to make it spawn with this setting?
I’ve never bother with it because you have to enable this manually when you add it.
If you are given a model to rig (which I am quite often), it already has the subsurf(s) added.
So either way you need to manually check this. Which is essentially the same as manually moving the modifiers.
However, if there was a option to have it automatically checked on when it is added (like auto-smooth), then it might actually be useful. Let me ask a dev about this.