No, unfortunately I can't share the original code, but I made a few changes to have it as close to the original as possible. I recognized, I missed a detail. The update is part of a forall, like so:
forall idx in 1..textArray.count save exceptions
update books set startText = null
where startText = textArray(idx).text
and textArray(idx).name is null;
If I klick the warning, it marks the line "update books...". It might be possible, that the warning covers the whole update command and actually refers to the "is null" comparison - just a guess. But even in the latter case, I don't get the reason behind the warning.