It's indeed that, telling your car that you have a tow bar and that it might need to adapt stuff the moment something is attached. Think lights etc. will work even without.
But just know that the coding itself is not too difficult. It's just ticking a box, and then go to the right bit of coding, and change some long coding, with the last VCDS software you just have to tick one or two boxes (can look up what exactly I had to do). If you don't have vcds, I'm pretty sure there's somebody not too far from you who will give you a hand.
If you do it, you know that everything that's there is actually 'rightly connected' (my autistic side likes to have stuff like that done
). Also, if you then ever decide to add a towbar, everything is in place.