Question regarding GPIO expander and WiFI intialisation

Hi All,
What is the general opinion to remove the I2C PCA9548 GPIO expander from the initialisation of the WiFI driver, if the board that I am using is a derivative of the Mangoh.io platform but does not include the GPIO expanders or I2C switches.

root@swi-mdm9x15:~# ifup wlan0
ERR* failed to write i2c data
FTL* Failed to enable PCA9548A I2C switch

Can I just comment out most of the function code in the file
yocto/meta-swi/meta-swi-mdm9x15/recipes-core/sierra-init-tiwifi/files/gpioexp.c
and recompile the yocto project, or is there a simper way not to get the GPIO service called when instantiating the WiFI driver?

Any ideas/pointers would be most appreciated
Kind Regards
Jason