It got changed as part of some other doveadm protocol changes. The change was somewhat accidental though and we didn't notice the difference. Anyway, practically this shouldn't have made any difference if the code was implemented as was described in
https://wiki.dovecot.org/Design/DoveadmProtocol It says that the client needs to send VERSION first, and as a reply it receives the "+" or "-" line. So it was more of a bug that previous Dovecot versions sent the +/- line too early. I added a note about this to the wiki page though.