I think skeleton should only be active on initial load when you open a channel. The commit I linked above contains this on description “show skeleton only on initial load” which works fine on full page chat desktop and mobile. Only drawer keeps skeleton for this purpose and this is why I think this is not by design. 
Now it uses always when you click to show a reply or a link to a previous message in the same channel even if the message is loaded. Here is an example the replied message is already loaded.
